Just One Catch (15 page)

When the sun came out again, some of the men entertained themselves by flying daredevil stunts (squeezing between flagpoles or buzzing the beaches at astonishingly low altitudes, especially if local women happened to be sunbathing). Just before Heller arrived on the base, two pilots had died, crashing into a mountain.

On July 15, Heller encountered his first “accurate” flak of the war. The squadron set off to destroy bridges and a fuel dump four miles north of Ferrara. Eleven days earlier, four planes had been holed over these targets; the men knew the place was hot. As he approached the IP, the initial point of the run, Heller went over in his mind everything he had to consider: What is the rate of closure? How fast are we coming in? What's our elevation? Level, level …

That night, the War Diary reported, “Seven planes [were holed] and one man [was] seriously wounded.… [Sergeant] Vandermuelen got it through the side.”

The next day, the record noted, “Vandermuelen died at 0200 hours. The Ferrara bridges [are] getting to be a jinx for us.” Around camp, boys said Vandermuelen's midsection had been severed. Reportedly, he had moaned, “I'm cold, I'm cold,” until the moment he died.

Then, on August 15, something happened to Joseph Heller. Over Avignon, flak pierced his plane, tearing apart the gunner's thigh. That day, three other B-25s went down. Among those killed was Earl C. Moon, the copilot on Heller's journey overseas. “Flak: Heavy,” the squadron history reported. “Red hanging puffs.… 5 chutes seen coming from [a holed] plane, 1 failed to open properly. Left engine [caught] fire and right engine was out.”

As his plane veered and bucked, descending, then shooting back up, Heller patched his gunner's leg. Like Sergeant Vandermuelen, the kid, Carl Frankel, kept saying he was cold. Heller responded with “sickly attempts at solicitous and reassuring platitudes,” he wrote. “When I went to visit [Frankel] in the hospital the next day, he must have been given blood transfusions, for his Mediterranean color was back, and he was in ebullient spirits. We greeted each other as the closest of pals and never saw each other again.”

The war changed for Heller. The 486th's War Diary said the corpsmen hoped to “forget about the [Avignon] mission,” but Heller couldn't let it go. “Ferrara … had [already] assumed in my memory the character of a … nightmare from which I had … escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenious kid in a Grimm fairy tale,” he wrote. Avignon calcified this fear. He understood the situation clearly and unequivocally: “They were trying to kill me.… [The fact] that they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill
me.
”

He wanted to go home.

Eight days later, he hurtled into the air again, terrified. The 488th had been ordered to bomb the bridges in Pont-Saint-Martin, over the Settimo River, in northwest Italy. Having received the codes and radio frequencies to use on the mission, Heller settled into 8U. His friend, Francis Yohannan, occupied a sister plane, 8P. Six months later, these two planes would collide in midair.

That day over Pont-Saint-Martin, August 23, 1944, the Americans hit the bridges they were after but also badly damaged the center of town. Roger Juglair, a village resident, has calculated that 130 civilians died during the bombing run, a fact Heller probably never knew for certain. (The 489th's War Diary said, “This period was one of ordinary activity with nothing special to note.”) Among the dead were several children who had been attending a sewing class in a kindergarten when the bombs struck. “I'm not aware of any of our consciences ever being bothered [by any of our missions],” Heller once said. “We didn't talk. We didn't sing patriotic songs; we sang risqué versions of other songs. I don't recall anybody being troubled by the bombs we were dropping.” The men just wanted to do the job and get the hell out. A possible exception on the mission to Pont-Saint-Martin was 2nd Lt. Clifton C. Grosskopf, the pilot of 8K. He later reported his bombs fell wide of the target because he committed “pilot error” while “executing evasive maneuvers.” There had been no flak; Grosskopf's account is odd, says Daniel Setzer: “[O]ne can only conclude that the pilot … took it upon himself to wrest control of the aircraft from the bombardier before the bomb run was completed in order to avoid bombing the village.”

In
Catch-22,
Heller would describe “bombing a tiny undefended village, reducing the whole community to rubble”—a mission whose “only purpose [was] to delay German reinforcements at a time when we [weren't] even planning an offensive.” Perhaps he thought of Grosskopf when he wrote, “Dunbar … dropped his bombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face a court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done it deliberately. Without a word [to anyone] Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission.”

*   *   *

AT THE END
of August, Heller was promoted to first lieutenant.

In mid-September, after flying forty-eight missions, seven of them through “heavy” flak, he felt unusually jumpy about a scheduled run to Bologna, a notorious hot spot. He was not slated to make this run, but he shared his comrades' worries, fears that mounted as nasty weather delayed the offensive. After the second cancellation, the War Diary noted that the “men [were] … apprehensive.” On September 16, when planes finally left the ground, the log recorded jauntily that “exacerbated nerves” had been “ameliorated.” To the crews' surprise, they encountered moderate flak, and the mission was deemed a success. Back in his tent, Heller slipped money orders into envelopes. Whatever his nerves were, they were not “ameliorated.”

*   *   *

“THE FIRST AMERICAN SOLDIERS
[marched into] Rome on the morning of June 4 [1944], and close on their heels, perhaps even beating them into the city, sped our congenial executive officer, Major Cover, to rent two apartments there for [recreational] use by the officers and enlisted men in our squadron,” Heller said in his memoir. With the apartments came “cooks and maids, and … female friends of the maids who liked to hang out there.”

In a separate account, Heller wrote, “[F]ellow fliers were coming back from Rome with … scintillating narratives of high life.… They spoke, rhapsodically and disbelievingly, of restaurants, night clubs, dance halls, and girls, girls, girls—girls in their summer dresses and skirts strolling everywhere on wedgie shoes with lofty heels and thong laces winding up … to the calves like gladiator boots.”

When he finally got to Rome, in urgent need of downtime, his comrades told him the “most valuable phrase” for romance was, “
Quanta costa?
”

Major Cover's apartments overlooked Via Nomentana. “[We] had horse-drawn cabs when[ever] we wished,” Heller recalled. In
Closing Time,
he noted—through the eyes of a character he said was based on him—“On the second day of my first leave there I returned from a short stroll alone and came back just as … Hungry Joe [whom Heller always claimed was based on Francis Yohannan's tent mate, Joe Chrenko] was getting down from a horse-drawn cab with two girls who looked lively and lighthearted.… ‘I'll treat you,' [he said to me].” Heller continued:

He let me start with the pretty one—black hair, plump, round face with dimples, good sized breasts—and it was … thrilling, relaxing, fulfilling. When we switched and I was with the wiry one, it was even better. I saw it was true that women could enjoy doing it too. And after that it has always been pretty easy for me, especially after I'd moved [back] to New York … and was cheerily at work in the promotion department at
Time
magazine [as Heller would be]. I could talk, I could flirt, I could spend, I could seduce women into seducing me.

One thing he never forgot: Rome was a hell of a lot cleaner than New York.

The Hotel Bernini Bristol, at the bottom of Via Veneto, housed the American Red Cross Officers Club. Heller and Chrenko would drink there after hours and get breakfasts there in the mornings. Occasionally, in the club, Heller ate a hot dog for lunch, but always they were sorry echoes of Nathan's.

“Killing time between meals and other pleasures … one sunny afternoon,” Heller and Chrenko “chanced upon a small storefront advertising itself as The Funny Face Shop,” Heller said. “[W]e went inside to have our faces sketched.” The young artist, who had been struggling to make a living during two foreign occupations, first by the Germans, now the Americans, drew caricatures of tourists. His name was Federico Fellini, the same Fellini who would one day make a name for himself as a brilliant filmmaker. “The drawing of me was exceedingly accurate,” Heller said. “Not until Fellini drew me did I ever appreciate I had a nose.”

He admitted, “We knew next to nothing about the city and its history.” Instead, he studied the “sanctioned night spots.” In the clubs, “there would be at least one female singer belting out just awful renditions of American hit-parade ballads, along with a small band containing a violin and accordion attempting American swing. Inevitably, some mournful Italian would warble ‘O Solo Mio' and a missing-Mom song.”

One afternoon, Heller blundered into what he thought was the reception area of a restaurant. He saw “about twenty calm enlisted men waiting patiently on straight-backed chairs … calm until, with instantaneous consternation, they [recognized me as] an officer.” He suffered “a second or two of shocked embarrassment [and] turned around and fled.” He never returned to the brothel.

Other clubs held tea dances in the afternoons, then became rollicking dance halls at night. One evening, in one such club, an older British officer introduced Heller to a “girl named Luciana who wanted to dance more than he did.” Heller said, “I was a lousy dancer … but she was worse, and so, it seemed, was everyone else.” Luciana worked for a French company in a nearby office. “Alone with her in a café later I made passes,” Heller wrote. “She declined to come back with me to the apartment because, she said, it was too late.” She promised she'd drop by the following morning before work, if he gave her his address. He did, but didn't think he would see her again. The next day, “[t]o my utter amazement … I was sleeping soundly when the maid awoke me to announce [Luciana's] arrival. She would accept no present from me when she left, not even a token gift for carfare and such, and I have been in love with her since, and with all women of generous nature.”

*   *   *

THE ROMAN PARTIES
made it even tougher to abide the USS
Corsica
.

Other R & R spots had their charms. On the island of Capri, Heller was captivated by the legend of the Lucky Little Bell of San Michele. “Once upon a time a little shepherd lived [on Capri] and he was the poorest of the poor children of the place,” began one version of the story. One night, in the darkness, the boy lost a small sheep he was tending. Fearing he would be punished for his carelessness, he wondered what to do, when he heard the faint ringing of a bell. Believing this to be the copper object on the missing animal's neck, he ran up a hill, past thistles and pebbles. A burst of light stopped him in his tracks. San Michele appeared to him, riding a white horse. “My boy,” said the saint, removing a modest bell that hung against his breast. “Take this and always follow the sound of it and it will keep you from danger.” Since then, the boy's life had been filled with sweetness.

Photographs of Heller in his tent, back on Corsica, wearing his flight jacket, reveal a tiny copper bell pinned to his collar, just above a round patch bearing the squadron's insignia, a busty nude female wielding a lightning bolt, straddling a bomb.

On one of his last flights, on the morning of September 23, 1944, Heller was assigned to chaff detail. Instead of bombs, his plane would carry bales of aluminized chaff. The crew would drop them to confuse enemy radar. The assignment came at the last minute. Word reached the squadron that a German division planned to tow the Italian cruiser
Taranto
into a deep channel in the harbor of La Spezia—a large seaport—and scuttle it to create an obstacle for Allied troops. Commanders called on the 340th to destroy the cruiser.

“Because we carried no bombs, we could go zigzagging in at top speed and vary our altitudes,” Heller wrote in
Now and Then
. Also, he said, “I shrewdly deduced there was no need for a bombardier [on this flight].”

He perched behind the pilot, wearing one flak suit and wrapping a second suit around his legs and groin. Tightly, he gripped his parachute pack (something he couldn't do when cramped inside the nose cone). The pilot and copilot were new to the squadron and didn't know what to make of him as he sat behind them. “It's okay,” he told them with more authority than he felt. “Let me know if the German fighters show up and I'll go back [down below].”

The sky grew thick with flak. The tail gunner broke his thumb while tossing out chaff. When the pilot banked up and away from the harbor, Heller turned his head. He felt, he said, “greatly satisfied with myself and … with all the others as well. We were unharmed; the turbulent oceans of dozens and dozens of smutty black clouds from the … flak bursts were diffused all over the sky at different heights. The other flights were coming through without apparent damage. And down below I could watch the bombs from one cascade after another exploding directly on the ship that was our target.”

For this mission, the 340th Bombardment Group was awarded the Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. After nine more flights—the last on October 15—Heller was done. Initially, he'd expected to fly fifty missions. Later, he was ordered to complete seventy. He wound up flying sixty. “I have not been able to get an answer as to how he managed to end his tour of combat with ‘only' sixty missions. The limit had been set to seventy,” Daniel Setzer says. The 487th's War Diary concedes, “The rules governing the disposition of combat crews changes so frequently … it's difficult to determine who will and wont [
sic
] go home.” Heller made no bones about the fact that he was terrified. Like several of his comrades, he was “flak happy.”