The Last Flight of Poxl West (21 page)

When I'd finished I sealed the envelope and placed it in my footlocker, where over the days to come, as this letter writing would become something of a habit, I would accrue quite a collection of undeliverables.

7.

Saturday night we were briefed again, this time by Wing Commander Pennington himself. We arrived at the airfield at 2100 hours. At 2315 we took off. Clear skies, a rarefied night absent moon or cloud. Three hundred miles from the English coast we joined our wing in formation over the North Sea. We were in rear right. This was the most dreaded position, most exposed to flanking attacks. Still I was grateful to have to worry only about the bomber to my left. Maintaining formation could be the difference between living and dying.

As I moved in, Navigator Smith came on the interphone.

“Press on regardless, Captain West.” I said certainly, but suggested that perhaps we should keep quiet, as we had for our former captain, Flight Officer Ford. This didn't keep Smith from bugging Gallsworthy and McSorely about the WAAFs he was sure they'd been with the night before. He ran on until we reached the German border. Contrails of Stirlings strung out thousands of feet below. At that height I was reminded of Goethe's description of blindness: “Everything near becomes distant.” Though I knew intellectually those fighters were a thousand, two thousand feet away, that distance might have been all distances, or none, in the enormous Prussian sky.

Our rendezvous point, position A, was less than an hour from Hamburg. Now Gallsworthy was to begin dropping his mysterious packages. Over the interphone the only sound was of his timing the drops: “One Lancaster, two Lancaster, three Lancaster,” all the way to sixty, then another drop. Frigid air filled the cockpit each time he opened the window. When he reset his count we looked behind to where thousands of silver swimming minnows filled dark air, reflecting the lights of bombers. Yellow flares marked the path before us. As we approached the Kiel Canal the previously cloudless sky filled with brown clouds of flak smoke.

Gallsworthy called out that he'd seen a Lancaster far off to our starboard. All seven men of its crew bailed out.

Then we were through it without incident.

Another half hour and Navigator Smith came over the interphone: We had achieved our final turning point at Kellinghausen. What we saw before us then made procedure unnecessary.

Hamburg was already glowing, an earthbound star. Lancaster squadrons all across the midnight horizon were lit by individual auras against the dark summer sky. By the time we made our approach, no green or yellow flare was discernible. They'd mixed together with the blockbusters each squadron had already dropped, four-thousand-pound bombs and four-pound incendiaries landing again and again as our bombers dropped their loads, blooming like enormous sunflowers thousands of feet down.

Gallsworthy came on the interphone: What was there to drop on? Bombs atop bombs? I thought of my mother. I thought of my father, and of Françoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, “Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb.”

Navigator Smith came after: “Press on,” he said.

I felt the lightening of our plane as our bombload went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke.

I banked left.

Already we were on our return path. We encountered not a single Luftwaffe fighter. Those silvery minnows Gallsworthy had dropped had fooled German radar into thinking there were thousands of bombers all across the vector on which the minnows flew. Bombers before and after us had dropped the packages, too, and the Luftwaffe fighters hadn't had enough fuel to stay skyward long enough to engage us. We'd approached Hamburg on the driest night of the summer and hardly faced any resistance.

Hamburg was given over to flame.

With the city burning behind us the night was no longer dark. Western suburbs of Hamburg burned phosphorescent, glowing out to their fuzzy lighted edges. There, glinting amid the dark earth below us on the path back to base, was the Elbe. The river flowed northward from below my father's tannery, through Hamburg and on to the North Sea on the other side of which I was now stationed. For the first time since arriving at RAF Grimsby I caught a whiff of days swimming with Johana and Niny, gnats buzzing in the low Bohemian evening. Below us the shrapnel of a bomb found its way into the Elbe, floating upstream and out to the North Sea. River water carrying it had flowed from Leitmeritz and from Schalholstice, where it cooled in vats of tanning leather at my father's business. Through Poland. Through the city I had just set ablaze during the dimming July night.

Hamburg's flames lit our backs for miles, dimming in our wake until the ruined city ebbed to a match tip on the far horizon.

Soon we were clear of Hamburg. And in those moments after I'd exacted revenge on German soil, a face arose in mind so lucidly I couldn't imagine shaking it, perhaps ever—a face I'd hoped to forget since I left her but which clearly I couldn't shake: Françoise's.

8.

Debriefing back at base at almost 0500 hours was joyous. The first moment of true happiness I'd felt since discovering I would be accepted into flight training. It allowed for a true forgetfulness of all else: This bombing was our whole world in the moments after we returned. Morale soared after our unqualified success. Navigator Smith recounted perfect turns his pilot—the Eastern European Jew now called Poxl West—had executed at each turning point. A low black course of stubble had cropped up on his jutting chin, and the deep furrow of his dark Etonian brow brought a feckless look to his flat face. McSorely described the night sky and the Catherine wheels raised by each blockbuster bomb as it landed on central Hamburg, one after the next, stoking flames so high we couldn't see the city itself.

Even taciturn Flight Engineer Smith disregarded unspoken protocol and told the WAAFs who questioned us about our perfect run. There was such good cheer in the Nissen hut, I wondered if rest would come that night for the crew of the S-Sugar. But we all fell immediately to sleep, and then, late that morning, I was awakened by Navigator Smith's cries. They were half-human, a macaw's squawk, which stirred no man among us but me, all the rest wholly overtaken by exhaustion. I dropped from my bed. I held his thrashing arms. He woke only long enough to dart upright. He looked me in the eyes. He steeled his body. He had long, sinewy arms and a thicket of dark, dark hair along them to match his brown brow. I could feel the sisal sharpness of his arm hair in my palms as he thrashed. Sweat covered his face and his eyes flashed.

Then he grew still. He recognized me and returned to himself.

“Wizard flying, young Yid,” he said. “Now let me sleep.”

The evening following our run, there was revelry. We went to the Rooster's Peck, where Gallsworthy and I played a game of darts. Our crew congratulated me on a perfectly executed run. Any reservations I'd had before dissolved in the warmth of drink. Even McSorely stood me a pint, and from behind his acne-covered face—he was only nineteen, after all, and looked like a schoolboy—I could see a softening of his features. After darts Gallsworthy returned to our table, where he hoisted a warm Harp and said, “To our pilot, Poxl West—a hebe who does some fine flying!” Laughter erupted among the men of S-Sugar. Reconnaissance reported severe damage to the Hamburg Krupps factory. We'd hit our targets. We'd done in Hamburg.

On our meander back to our hut, Gallsworthy held me back until we were a good thousand feet behind the rest of S-Squadron.

“Poxl,” he said. “Poxl, I know you know all about women.” He was slurring his words, and while I should have been thinking of Glynnis, I was thinking about Françoise. “You had Glynnis back in London and you have your cousins. But me…” His weight shifted all the way to his right foot, then to his left, almost tipping him each time. “Me, I've never even kissed a girl, if you can believe it.” Gallsworthy was a squat five feet tall, maybe a few inches more, and, even despite his training, nearly two hundred pounds.

I could believe it.

He continued.

“If I could meet a WAAF or some girl in town,” he said.

My kind slovenly friend Gallsworthy needed my help finding love. Even for him a taste of death over Hamburg had touched off a longing for love. I told him that when we were back in London he would come with me and meet my cousin Niny.

“Let's have the picture of her,” Gallsworthy said. We were back to our Nissen hut by now and though he'd seen the photograph a thousand times, I went to my footlocker and picked out the photo of Niny, Johana, and me along the Elbe in Schalholstice, just outside Brüder Weisberg. We stood beside one another, not touching, and behind us the very vats were sunk into the ground, inside of which my father's men submerged the hides in need of tanning.

Gallsworthy was the drunkest I'd ever seen him. Now he was lying back on his bed. I took him the photo and he held it very close to his face and said, “Niny, Niny, Niny,” an incantation, until his arms bent back and the picture sat against his chest. He passed out dreaming of my cousin and of the image of my Elbe, which he knew only from that photograph, and which no amount of killing or distance could ever rob from my memory.

9.

Next few days we awoke to fog so thick it was as if we were back up among the clouds. By Wednesday there was an even heavier cover, morning announced only by a subtle glowing change in hue. The Americans were grounded during the day, just as we were at night. It was Thursday before another run could be attempted. Some kind of electricity ran through the crewmen in the briefing room—our turning points were changed, but the destination remained:

We were to make a second run on Hamburg.

All the other bombers in our squadron had flown a second run on the city Tuesday, but we'd been grounded. Upon takeoff we had lost oil pressure and were forced to return to base. They reported what we had: a clear, safe run to the city. There was an edge to their stories. They'd experienced a parallel success to ours, but now they described flying into a column of smoke so thick they could taste soot from the city in their oxygen masks. We had fuzzy heads the days after our victorious run. We had time on our hands from the failed takeoff and the fog. Idle, we began to consider what we'd done.

“How many you suspect we killed on that run?” Gallsworthy said at breakfast. “Thousand? Two?”

“More, I'd think,” McSorely said.

“More than two thousand,” Gallsworthy said. “That's a lot of civilians.” He paused and took a bite of his sausage. “That's a lot of anything.”

“Well, sure,” McSorely said. “But it's a huge city. There're plenty more who survived.”

Again from the edges of my memory came that image: cobblestones rising to mind; Glynnis's pale skin. Françoise's broad nose.

Wing Commander Pennington arrived and briefed us on our run. Flight Officer Rowlandson was to fly with S-Sugar on one more run before taking over his own commission.

Soon we lifted off again into a light mist. We weren't far from base before it grew apparent this was to be a more challenging run. S-Sugar was among the lead bombers. No matter how high we rose through the clouds it felt we would never overcome them. Over the North Sea we finally broke from cloud cover to witness a blanket of undulating gray below. A bomber's moon provided some light. It wasn't a help for long. Navigator Smith called out coordinates for our upcoming turning point. We were miles out over the sea, passing above Heligoland, when before us was a billowing column of black pumice. My first thought was that this was what we'd wrought in Hamburg.

We'd ignited Germany. Here, rising nearly 35,000 feet above the ground, was the evidence. Then the swelling and dying of dozens of white explosions ran through the great black mass. It was hard to know how so much flak could be thrown into the air. Perhaps we were witnessing some unprecedented new Nazi weapon, some horrible counterpunch to the silver strips we'd dropped to disrupt Nazi radar and which had allowed us to light such a monumental conflagration.

“Flak ahead,” Navigator Smith called out. “Or … something.”

Gallsworthy came on the interphone next:

“Not flak,” he said. “Lightning.”

Before us was the largest cloud ever amassed in the air above Nazi Germany. As we passed over the German coast south of Cuxhaven, the great mass undulated. All through the cloud, branches of white fire spread and retreated like the passing of axons to synapses in the great black brain of the Reich.

Gallsworthy came over the interphone again:

“Perhaps we might consider turning back, Captain West.”

No sooner had the words escaped his mouth than Navigator Smith followed: “I'm not going out with an LMF”—lacking in moral fiber, the worst kind of discharge from the service. “You're certain to get one, too, Captain West. How will that look for a citizen of a Nazi protectorate?”

We stayed in formation.

The bombers ahead pushed headlong into the cloud. Silence saturated our bomber. The only sound was the low, anxious rumble of nearby thunder. For once something wrought by the Lord had quieted Navigator Smith's constant chatter. At last the sky grew as angry as I was at the loss of my parents, of Françoise, of Glynnis. Like a tumid-eyed pup seeking his mother's teat, we edged around the crevasses comprising the outer realm of that great black cur, which lit up so frequently it was difficult to know just what we were seeing.

We would fly directly into the cloud.

First came the winds. A current of cold air swept S-Sugar's wings, rocking us until we banked right and then left. Soon we were alone amid dense cloud. No other bombers from our wing were visible.

Nothing was visible.

We pushed on, and then a flash—for a second I was blind. When I regained my sight, a deep blue glow enshrouded the cockpit. The de-icing tube on the other side of the perspex bore a halo of blue flame. Blue tendrils shot back and forth between Browning guns of the front turret Gallsworthy manned. All around the propellers to our left and right, blue auras outlined the blur of blades.