Just One Catch (13 page)

It was hard to know which was worse: the cockroaches in his bed or the battery of shots he had to take to prevent cholera, smallpox, tetanus, and typhoid, in preparation for going overseas. His left arm puffed and throbbed. In addition to flight training, his duties on the base included early-morning bodybuilding, calisthenics, and detail work, such as firing the shower room's boiler, hanging flypaper in the barracks, and cleaning the icebox in the mess hall. Columbia provided few weekend diversions. Quaint shops sold three scoops of ice cream for a nickel and banana splits for twelve cents apiece. An informal history kept by the bomb group to which Heller would be assigned asserts that “entertainment [in Columbia] was limited to a fairly decent meal and a few drinks, but … upon presentation of the bill one would think they had paid a first installment on three rooms of furniture.”

By the time he left South Carolina in April, Heller had logged over 230 hours in the air. The B-25s on which he trained were medium bombers, with two engines and twin rudders on a tail boom, and a top turret featuring two fifty-caliber machine guns. The planes had a range of approximately fifteen hundred miles, round-trip. On the ground, they looked ungainly and silly, creatures out of their element—not something to which you'd trust your life. Heller discovered he was not a natural flier. Some of the guys took to the aircrafts as smoothly as sexual maestros had gravitated to girls back in the old social clubs at home. Heller was not afraid to fly, but he was not at ease with parachutes, fuselage, screaming blue flames. These were not part of his pulse. Yet eventually he adjusted—if not with talent, then with competence. He learned to roll with the plane as it maneuvered, to think of the plane as sitting still, and to sit still with it, while the world outside lurched and swerved.

The sky was vaster than he had ever dreamed: a glorious nothing, shimmering with emptiness. Far below, the land abstracted itself into green-and-gold patches, triangles of brown and blue, squares of light and dark. Heavy in his flak suit, he felt, with each new burst of speed, as weightless as a kite ripped from its anchor. Up high, heat battled cold on the surface of your skin, in the meat of your head: It was like drinking hot coffee that suddenly went tepid at the back of your mouth.

In the mornings, he and his crews loaded training bombs onto the planes: shells filled with nearly one hundred pounds of sand and about three pounds of black powder, whose patterns, once the powder hit the ground, revealed various degrees of accuracy. On practice runs, two students took turns dropping the shells on triangular shacks or concentric rings set up as targets in South Carolina fields. One student would pull the toggle switch while the other photographed the drop using a movie camera aimed through a four-inch hole in the plane's floor. Later, the students studied the films, looking for mistakes they had made.

Always, as he approached the practice targets, Heller leaned forward, straining against his seat belt as the plane dived. He tried to center the target in his bombsight, called to his pilot, “Level! Level!” and then parted the bomb bay's doors. As the plane pulled up in a steep bank, he looked back, to see little puffs of smoke rising and falling below. The dive was exhilarating—a heedless plunge—the pullout even more so, as it meant a return to safety. Thrust and relax: What could be more appealing to a twenty-year-old boy?

He also flew gunnery missions, the planes winging single file over the ocean and then circling back to base. On the way, instructors told the students to shoot their machine guns in bursts and not hold their fingers on the triggers, as this would cause the gun barrel to heat up and fire rounds on its own. Often, weary at the end of a day, students ignored the rules, hammering the triggers hard, but the instructors let this pass. Planes sometimes landed pinpricked with holes, or with their antennae shot off, courtesy of their companions. Always, on a gunnery flight, one or two men threw up, nauseated by the gunpowder fumes.

Once you were over the ocean, it was tempting just to keep going until you were swallowed by the light or the darkness. Heller thought of the bell buoy off Coney Island, the one he used to swim to as a kid, and how easy it would have been to give himself to the undertow.

Night flying he loved. Cities reduced to halos. The green and red lights on the ends of his wings were like phosphorescent birds dipping down out of the stratosphere. All distances flattened to black. At night, the planes made sounds he was never aware of during the day. In the stillness of the dark, each rattle, hum, and tick became amplified. Perhaps this psychological difference accounted for the rule that crew members flying after sundown had to use oxygen starting at five thousand feet, though this directive didn't apply on day flights until much higher altitudes. Or perhaps there really was less oxygen at night.

Since bombardiers were sometimes asked to navigate, Heller had to practice guiding a bomber in cross-country formations—a skill he never mastered. The cross-country flights could be up to four hundred miles long, round-trip. Once, he lost Georgia. Another time, electrical storms interfered with his radio compass. He didn't know where he was. He pointed to the bank of a river below and told his pilot to turn left—he was sure he'd find a familiar landmark on the river's opposite bank: a small farm, automobile headlights on a backcountry road. It turned out that the river he'd spotted was really the shore of the Atlantic, and he had pointed his crew toward Africa. Clouds yawned ahead. Finally, the pilot took over, patching together various radio signals to get them back to base with just enough fuel to land.

At Anderson Army Air Field in Walterboro, South Carolina, just down the road from Columbia, Heller's group received gas masks, helmets, decontaminators, and weapons. The group's commanders made the men practice safety drills during imaginary air raids, hike through thick pine forests with their gas masks on, and practice falling into ditches as planes strafed them, dropping flour bombs. The men bonded more quickly than ever under these sweaty conditions. Heller particularly liked an easygoing, humble young fellow from Philadelphia named Francis Yohannan. He was training to be a pilot. Together, he and Heller joked about the hikes (“jackassing around,” they called it) and the food (as another member of the group wrote, “It is an unwritten law [in the army] that food must not be separated.… Army SOP calls for prunes on top of pancakes. Unless you have had baked beans topped with rice pudding, you never before really enjoyed the true flavor of either”).

At Walterboro, Heller also liked a thoughtful young medic attached to the 488th Bomb Squadron, a draftee named Benjamin Marino. Like Yohannan, Marino would accompany Heller overseas in the next few weeks.

*   *   *

ON ONE OF HIS LAST
training flights, Heller and his crew traveled, along with several other planes, to Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field, which he used to pass on his bicycle, delivering telegrams for Western Union. Once on the ground, the crews had time to kill before returning to South Carolina. Heller took two of his comrades, a pair of Chicago boys named Bailey and Bowers, into Manhattan, which they'd never seen, and treated them to a meal at a restaurant called Lindy's. “[T]hey weren't entirely at home with its raucous splendor or mainly Jewish menu,” he wrote years later. He ordered a chopped liver and smoked turkey sandwich on rye, a sour pickle, a sour tomato, and strawberry cheesecake for dessert. His buddies bristled at the happy talk of FDR at the tables around them. They told Heller they were strict isolationists and didn't approve of the president's leadership. One of them said everyone in the place looked like Harry the Horse, from the famous Damon Runyon story, “by which he meant, I was aware, that they all looked Jewish,” Heller wrote, “and of course [they] did,” including him.

On the way back to base, flying low over Brooklyn, Heller sat in the plane's nose cone, seeing Coney Island spread narrowly before him, exposed, vulnerable.

*   *   *

HELLER'S FLIGHT
record for April 27, 1944, signed by Maj. Homer B. Howard, lists him as “in transit overseas,” with over four hundred hours of flight time under his belt. He had been assigned to the 340th Bombardment Group, 488th Bomb Squadron. He had left from Hunter Field in Georgia. At first, he had no idea where he was headed; he was just thrilled to be escaping the Deep South's kamikaze mosquitoes. They had become peskier as the weather warmed up.

Right before he left, he heard from friends in Coney Island that his old pal Abie Ehrenreich, who had been serving overseas as an aerial gunner, had been shot down over North Africa several months back and was apparently a prisoner of war.

Once airborne over the ocean, the crew opened its sealed orders, as it had been instructed to do. Earl C. Moon, the copilot, read the orders aloud. First stop: Natal, Brazil, about an eight-hour leg. Then Ascension Island, Liberia, Marrakech, Dakar, and Algiers. An auxiliary fuel tank had been installed in the bomb bay for the extended trip. Along the way, the crew was supposed to stay alert for the wreckage of a pair of planes that had taken off days earlier on an identical route. This did not inspire confidence.

Heller didn't want to swallow his Adabian tablets, for the suppression of malaria, fearing they'd give him symptoms of the disease. Nor did he care for the mosquito spray the crew had been ordered to use on the plane so they wouldn't ferry virus-infested insects down to South America. This was the first time he had ever seen an aerosol spray can.

In Natal, he ate seedless oranges and small green bananas. He didn't much like them, or the powerful, bitter coffee. But cigarettes were a nickel a pack, and whiskey was plentiful.

On Ascension Island, he watched a few of his comrades fishing in the sea (using raw meat for bait) and saw a bad movie one night on an open-air screen erected on a hill.

The crew was told about other planes that had failed to complete the journey they were now making, and whose wreckage they were supposed to keep an eye out for.

The Frenchmen Heller observed in Marrakech astonished him, sipping expensive aperitifs in luxury hotels as though the Germans had not overrun their country and people weren't dying each hour, so they—the affluent, lolling about here in Morocco—might one day return to their lavish estates. Somehow, he felt he was witnessing a fundamental truth about the nature of war, if only he could grasp its complexities.

At an American replacement center in Algeria, his group waited to receive word of its final destination. A character in his novel
Closing Time
(1994), clearly based on him, says, “[In Algeria], I shared a tent with a medical assistant, older than I, also [a]waiting assignment, who [like me] wished to write short stories like William Saroyan and was also positive he could. Neither of us understood that there was no need for more than one Saroyan. Today we might conclude from the insignificance of Saroyan that there had not been great need for even one.”

Waiting around, the crews were bored, but their superiors had warned them not to wander far from the replacement center in search of booze or women. A GI had been murdered recently, his body found castrated and his scrotum sewn into his mouth. The men didn't really believe this story. Nevertheless, they stuck close to the base.

Finally, the orders came through: Alesan Air Field, Corsica. Heller's official date of assignment there was May 21, 1944. Within a few weeks, several of the men would erect a sign on the outskirts of the field, proclaiming,
340TH
BOMBARDMENT
GROUP
(
MEDIUM
)
, THE
BEST
DAMN
GROUP
THERE
IS
(
PRODUCT OF
U.S.A.
).

*   *   *

HELLER LEARNED
he'd be sharing his tent with a dead man: an Okie kid, Pinkard, who had been shot down and killed while trying to bomb a railway bridge north of Ferrara, Italy, in the Po Valley. Pinkard's cot had been left untouched since his death, and his presence, in the form of his absence, was loud inside the tent.

The U.S. Army had established seventeen airfields on Corsica, and the men's tents were scattered all around them, on rolling ground at the base of a low hill, beyond which snowcapped mountains glimmered. A single electric generator served each humble shelter; in cold weather, the men had to improvise to keep warm, constructing makeshift stoves, many of which exploded or set canvas walls on fire. Commanders closely monitored electricity use. An entry in the War Diary of the 487th Bomb Squadron, for October 7, 1944, noted that a “Capt. Winebrenner made a lite [
sic
] inspection of personnel tents this morning and clipped only one wire. Apparently it was the only tent honest enough to leave their high voltage bulb in. Other tents with two lights were smart enough to conceal one.” (The War Diaries—daily logs—were army regulation; various men contributed to the record, often anonymously.)

Mud and piles of stinking garbage tossed about the tents attracted mice and rats. The men shot at the creatures with Colt .45s, using the ammunition they'd been issued in their survival kits when they'd first flown overseas. “[T]he sound of a .45 discharging inside of a tent is ear-shattering,” corpsman George Underwood recalled in an oral history of the air base. “If [the] shots missed their targets, at least they succeeded in terrifying the rats, as well as folks in the neighboring tents.” When heavy rains came, as they often did, washing away tent pegs in swift brown rivulets, the men discovered the downside of indoor target practice, and sat shivering under chilly leaks. The mud became goo; the roads and walking paths, never fine to begin with, deteriorated altogether.

When Heller arrived on base, Alesan personnel were still suffering from two devastating setbacks. First, on March 22, 1944, Mount Vesuvius had erupted, destroying most of the 340th's airplanes, which had been stationed near Pompeii. The group scrambled to relocate. It secured replacement planes for its new spot on Corsica, still technically behind enemy lines, though the island had just been liberated by the French and local partisans known as the Maquis, after a scrub brush common on Corsica that had given the partisans cover. The base was still in a state of chaos from the 340th's move, and the shiny new replacement planes made everyone nervous: They had not yet acquired camouflage paint, and shone like mirrors from the sky.