Beyond the Call (14 page)

Immediately he sensed the man wavering. Liquor might be precious, but dollars were better than bullion in this city. Robert stuffed the bills into the guard's coat pocket and pried the bottle from his grubby fingers. Simultaneously smiling and bracing himself, he took a swig of the blue liquor. It was like methanol. Wheezing, he offered the bottle back. The soldier took a slug, and soon they were like old buddies, passing the bottle back and forth. The Russian smiled, Robert smiled, the POWs tried to smile.

At last, Robert announced, ‘We go now, bye-bye.' With a cheerful gesture, the guard stood aside and waved his American friends through, then went back to his post to sit down and continue sweating off his hangover.

They made it to the station without any more hindrance, and with plenty of time to spare before the Odessa train was due. Like the rest of the city, Lwów station was a grand piece of nineteenth-century architecture, with great, echoing halls. But the POWs didn't look as out of place as they might have expected. There were millions of displaced persons in Poland, and people were accustomed to seeing ragged strangers in their midst.

While the men waited, Robert hurried off to the shops, and returned laden with food. He shared it among them, along with handfuls of dollars. When everything was safely stowed away, he hurried the men up to the platforms and onto the train. As they boarded, they shook him by the hand, some of them seizing hold of him and hugging him; some had tears in their eyes.

As the train pulled away, Robert stayed to watch it go. With a sudden, almost painful, clarity, he recalled the last time he had waved someone away on a train journey – Eleanor, at Riverside in California, when she set off on the long journey to Chicago. It had been the very last time he had seen her, a year ago now. It felt like a lifetime. But he could still conjure up the look in her eyes and hear those last words she called out …

He wondered if he would ever see her again. He wondered if those 23 men would find their way home to the people they loved, whoever and wherever they were. Robert had done all he could to see them on their way to freedom. How many others would there be before he was done? In his pocket, his hand touched the slips of paper – each one a location, a number, a set of directions to the next group of lost souls.

The final wagon disappeared beyond the bend, and Robert turned on his heel, walked back through the station, and out into the streets of Lwów. He had places to be, and time was short.

Chapter 7

FIGHTING BASTARD OF THE UKRAINE

U.S. Planes Rap Targets Dozen Miles
Ahead of Reds Advancing on Dresden

C
LOSEST DIRECT AIR RAID SO FAR
. Cottbus lies only 12 miles west of Red Army Spearheads. … American Flying Fortresses and Liberators more than 1,180 strong smashed today at targets only a dozen miles ahead of the advancing Red Army. … The heavy bombers had an escort of more than 430 Mustang fighters, bringing the total air force hurled at Germany today to 1,530 planes. …

Dresden has been under almost continuous assault by British and American air forces for two days and nights. This vital hub of German rail and supply connections which is only about 43 miles distant from the most advanced Red Army column has had one of the heaviest plasterings of the war.

Cottbus, 53 miles southeast of Berlin, is a target of almost equal importance. It is a big rail junction point from which highways radiate in all directions. The American assault followed a double blow by 717 RAF four-engined bombers at Chemnitz …

The News-Herald
(Franklin, Pennsylvania), 15 February 1945

 

15 FEBRUARY 1945: NEAR STASZÓW, POLAND

E
NGINES SCREAMING, LOSING
altitude, a B-17 Flying Fortress burst through the cloud base at 400 feet, struggled to level out, then
flew on south-east, heading into a gathering snowstorm. Two engines dead, her silver body peppered with holes, bleeding oil and gasoline, she raced on above the treetops. Laborers in the fields and travelers in the country lanes looked up in alarm as the wounded beast roared overhead.

In the cockpit, Lieutenant Arnold A. Tillman worked to keep the Fortress airborne and level. At the same time, he and his co-pilot, Lieutenant Stan Neese, scanned the ground below for a place to land. She had no name, this Fort; she was just B-17G 43-37687, call-sign BX/Y. And yet to Lieutenant Tillman and his crew, ‘687' was home, a little piece of America. At this moment she was a rather fragile, broken piece of America that looked likely to get spread across half a mile of Polish countryside.

The Fort had been part of a huge force sent to bomb the marshaling yards at Cottbus, Germany. The flak barrage was intense, fragments slapping and zinging through 687's skin. She lost an engine while they were still over the target, and flew on with the prop feathered. During the turn off the target to head for home, a second engine died, and 687 began losing altitude. They weren't going to make it. The only option was to turn back east and make for Poland.
¹
Losing power and altitude, the crew began jettisoning everything that wasn't bolted down: machine guns, ammunition, flak jackets. But still 687 kept losing height.

They had been struggling on for nearly an hour when they came out of the clouds and began looking for a place to crash-land. As Tillman and Neese scanned the landscape, a third engine was stuttering. If they didn't find a spot to put this crate down immediately, they were finished. They were in a broad, shallow valley with great tracts of woodland everywhere, and the fields were all small, separated by hedgerows. While the pilots searched and fought to keep the plane in the air, the rest of the crew gathered in the radio operator's compartment, hunkered down in crash positions; some of them began to say the Lord's Prayer. At last, Tillman spotted what looked like a suitable field, just below a line of trees on a gentle rise. He made a snap decision to put down there.

Neese flipped the switch for the landing gear, and there was a tense few seconds – the gear was almost certainly damaged, and if it was shot, they'd have to do a belly landing. Miraculously, the light came on indicating that the wheels were down and locked.

With the snowy field racing up to meet them, Tillman leveled the Fort out and dropped her down, drawing back the throttles on the two remaining engines to let the wheels hit the ground. It was instantly clear that the field wasn't going to be long enough. The tree line was racing toward them. Tillman rammed the throttle levers forward and pulled back on the control column. One of the engines, already running rough, gave a final stutter and died. With her last dregs of speed and power, dragging herself by her one surviving engine, the Fort bounced upward, brushed through the treetops, and sank down on the far side. There was an instant's glimpse of another small field, then she hit the snow, skidded, and eventually slewed to a stop, straddling the boundary between the field and another copse, wheels in a ditch and her nose among the trees.

The last engine rumbled on for a while, whipping up a little blizzard across the ground. Then it too was shut down, and silence settled over the field.

It was broken by the squeak of the escape hatch opening. One by one, the officers dropped out onto the snow. The gunners emerged from the fuselage door. Together they milled around the bomber, looking at the holes in the skin, the ruined engines, gazing back toward the trees, wondering how in the world they had survived.

Lieutenant Tillman quickly organized the destruction of all the classified materials on board – the navigator's maps, the bombardier's data charts, target list, pilot's notes, and finally the Norden bombsight, which they pulverized with pistol fire. They had barely finished when they saw a squad of Russian soldiers heading across the field toward them, rifles at the ready.

‘
Amerikanski
!' the crew shouted. ‘
Amerikanski
!' To the men's astonishment, as the soldiers drew near it became apparent that they were all women. They looked the Americans over, glanced at the stranded plane, then turned about and walked back to the road.

‘Guess none of us took their fancy,' said Sergeant Echola, the tail gunner.

There wasn't a soul in sight. The Americans, alone in the snowy landscape, wondered what they were going to do now.

 

815 Hummel Avenue, Lemoyne, Pennsylvania

A
IR ATTACK PLANNED AT
Y
ALTA
. … Dresden, an important railway and industrial city, was already in flames from raids yesterday and Tuesday night, when it was the main target of an assault force totaling some 8,— (
Continued on Page 6
.)

E
LEANOR
T
RIMBLE PUSHED
away the newspaper with a sigh. It all sounded awful, even though America was winning. She could scarcely even imagine what a bombed city in flames would look like, or envisage all those thousands of airplanes, or the dangers faced by the men flying them. All she could do was thank the Good Lord that Robert wasn't a part of it anymore. No longer would she suffer the anguish of seeing those news reports and wondering if he had been involved, and whether he was one of the dead or missing.

She shifted Carol Ann on her lap and sat back from the breakfast table. Gazing lovingly into the little face, Eleanor told her baby once more that her daddy was safe now and would soon be home. Carol Ann, with no idea what she was talking about, smiled back, gurgling happily.

Ruth, Robert's mother, was standing by to take the baby in her arms while Eleanor got ready to go to work. It was a comfort to both of them to know that Robert was out of danger for the rest of the war, and that his daughter wouldn't grow up without a father. It was about time somebody in this family had a father they could love and always recall with affection. It had been such a weight of worry for Robert. But it was all past now. He was safe.

H
E HAD TO
go back to Kraków. There was no way around it; he was needed there.

The very thought filled him with dread. Only a few days had passed since his visit to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and his mind had had no chance at all to come to terms with what he had seen there. The thought of going back to that area, even if only to the city of Kraków, was unbearable. He had tried to draft a report on the visit for Eastern Command, but it had all been too vivid. The frozen bodies were the worst. Even more than the pathos of the barely living survivors, it was the skeletal corpses, bent and huddled in the shadowy interior of the shed and lying in the freezing slush on the ground. Especially the children. There was nothing in all of creation so pitiable, so bitter, as that. Attempting to articulate the bestiality of what he had witnessed, to convey even a fraction of that briefest of glimpses into the abyss, made him break up inside.

To the world, Captain Robert Trimble presented a placid, even cheerful, countenance, never short of a smile. But inside, the wounds were raw, not yet hardened into scar tissue. Combat had left deep marks on him. Mission after flak-torn mission had stretched his nerves and left them permanently taut. And now he was learning that the world was even worse than he had believed it to be. He had to hold it in, fight his way past it. And to do that, he had to go on with his mission, and go wherever it took him. Right now, that meant back to Kraków, where the OSS agents had identified several groups needing help.

After seeing his first batch of POWs safely off from Lwów, Robert had briefly felt heartened, and he hurried back to the hotel, packed up his kit and a big batch of rations, then headed for the airfield on the outskirts of the city. He had official, above-board business to attend to which would take him a big part of the way to Kraków and enable him to make use of Russian transportation. There was a crash-landed aircrew from the 96th Bomb Group in need of evacuation at Staszów. Eastern Command had told them to hang in there while an officer was sent to pick them up. Normally it would take a lot longer – at
least a week or more – to arrange an evacuation, but Captain Trimble was nearby, and he needed his cover story. Whoever they were, they were lucky guys.

With the grudging assistance of the Soviet officer who served as interpreter, NKVD escort, and watcher (still upset about Robert's sudden disappearance from Lwów the previous day), Robert secured a place on a Soviet flight going west.

The flight from Lwów to Rzeszów – the nearest airfield to the crash-landing site – was only about 80 miles, but from there it was 50 miles more to Staszów, along winding roads in a Russian jeep, with only his escort to keep him company. It was a long journey for a man who'd had hardly any sleep.