Memoir From Antproof Case (21 page)

Alone over the Mediterranean, lost in skies of cloudless blue, as free as an angel, I could hear deep notes rising from fifteen hundred horses running, and I would sing in time and in counterpoint.

I danced, after a fashion—strapped into a parachute, strapped into my seat, burdened with all kinds of things strapped onto me. I moved the plane in wasteful, unauthorized, dangerous, beautiful maneuvers—in banks that lifted the load to the point of almost breaking us apart, in dives that sought the hypnotic blue of the sea, and in climbs in which I thought that if I kept the throttle out I might come near the precincts of God.

I found that, as I listened to the silver sound of the engine, fears that had been ferocious and unbearable suddenly were tame, and I could take what I did to the limit, dancing on a knife edge, absolutely certain, rising powerfully on voluminous waves of grace that would vanish neither in combat nor in limping home nor in touching down, but only after my time in the sea, returning the music whence it had come.

 

The first Messerschmitt I ever saw broke my rhythm. I was in one of the huge empty Mediterranean quadrants from which I could see neither the coast of Africa nor the coast of Sicily, and he appeared several miles away at 10:30, already climbing, having seen me first.

I was heading south, with the morning sun on my left, as he was gathering altitude to come at me in a shallow dive from out of the glare. I found myself saying, "What am I going to do?" There wasn't much I
Could
do, because he was already far above me and beginning his turn. The safe thing would have been to dive under him and loop up in a back flip, to equal his altitude or at least decrease his advantage. But the great rhythms of the engine, beating through my chest and cradling my heart, dictated other tactics.

I said, "Fuck it," and turned into the sun, climbing at full throttle with superchargers. I held my left hand in front of my face and peered through a little hole I made by holding my thumb almost flush with my index finger. It is not impossible to see a plane coming out of the sun, just very difficult and painful. Because your eyes must continually seek their rest, you are not so much looking as looking away. What you see becomes a series of stills from which you must calculate the movement of your target from one frame to the next, something I would not have been able to do absent the rhythmic counterpoint of the engine and my sense of being outside the aircraft and watching it move through the clouds. With these, I could calculate. I could indeed. I picked up the Schmitt and I stuck to him even though he was framed in a painful white halo.

Had it not been for the elevation of my spirits that morning I would not have been able to put a black dot coming out of the sun in my sights. We had only seconds before colliding, and we both were firing, knowing that if either of us got a hit we both would die. The paths of my wing cannons converged at three hundred yards, and our combined speed was close to a thousand miles an hour, which meant that if I had put my fire on him properly we would have collided in another two thirds of a second.

Although I didn't know his fire convergence distance and I assumed he didn't know mine, I knew that he knew what I knew. And it was he who broke off, because he wanted to live, whereas it was I who held and fired, because I cared not so much about living, and I was angry and happy and most probably half mad.

We rolled and looped without knowing precisely where we would come out relative to one another. That was the throw of the dice, but now, at least, we were starting on an equal basis. When I completed my loop and came out level, I saw him. The cannons in his nose were firing. Before I knew it, they scattered past me, knocking a few holes in my tail section. I had no shot, but he had no more position. He dived to my left because to get his shot he had had to pull ahead of me. He was giving away his life for a sweep shot, and what good is a sweep shot against an armored fighter like a P-51? You have to be very lucky, and he wasn't.

I dived after him: he knew it. He snaked: it hardly mattered. I snaked too, and soon I was locked on. I fired, but to no effect. I was waiting for him to pull up and give me the broadside of a barn. He had to, or he would go into the sea, and when he came out of his dive I fired my six cannons in a very long burst, and I got him.

He leveled out, smoking. His canopy opened, long seconds passed, and then a minute, and then another minute. I followed above, waiting for him to bale out. "Come on! Come on!" I screamed. "Get out!" He was steadily losing altitude, and the white smoke had turned to black. As the seconds passed and fire leapt from his engine cowling, I thought my heart would burst.

Then I saw him pop up from the cockpit and put his foot on the bulkhead the way you would if you were going to jump out. I felt tremendous relief, because I thought that, though I had taken a Messerschmitt from the Luftwaffe's order of battle, I had not killed a man. The British would pick him up in the Malta Channel, and he would spend the rest of the war weaving baskets.

I was happy when I saw him topple out. But he had hesitated too long at the edge. He hadn't jumped, he had fallen. I banked to circle him, and watched him descend, arms and legs flailing but somehow still, chute unopened, until he disappeared into the sea.

Then I turned for home, with neither music nor dancing but, still, with the determination that when I went up again (the next morning) I would have the music and dancing as much as I might need.

 

In my first contact with the enemy I had been working with a very narrow margin, and following thereafter were a number of margins narrower still. Though I knew how to go into a fight, and could exploit the union of euphoria and the power that comes from smiling at death, I did not want to die there, so I began to build.

The boys with whom I flew were coming into their strengths, whereas mine were flowing away with age. The heart of their lives was being formed in the battles they fought in the air, and they had begun to forget whatever else they hardly knew anyway. Never would there be anything they would do better, and nothing they would remember would hold half the light of their great days in the air. But as I was at the brink of middle age I had to trick my way out of death. I conspired with the mechanics to modify my plane.

War in the air was still quite chivalrous. Even now, it remains more so than war at sea or on land, perhaps because of the openness of the battlefield, the purity of the forces required for advantage, the bias toward individualism. Forty years ago, deception in air combat did not go beyond camouflaged planes, radio silence, and surprise attack. Other than that, you were expected to triumph because of the superiority of your technology and your greater skill and bravery in flight.

I thought that this might not be enough, so, first, I ran thicker cable from the cockpit to the control surfaces. We got the cable from light bombers, and it hardly added any weight, although we were sufficiently cautious to keep a running tally of the increase, making up for it in operations by loading slightly less fuel.

Then I reinforced—and, in some cases doubled—the hinges, flanges, bolts, and other attachments, the pivots, divots, davits, and rabbits that in a maneuver were the points of strain. At first the mechanics were skeptical. They said, "The airframe won't take the strain you want to be able to inflict on the aircraft."

I answered with a question: "They don't build these without a margin of safety, do they?"

"No."

"What is it?"

They threw up their shoulders. They didn't know.

"Let's say it's ten percent," I said. "Drop it to two."

"If we drop it to two," one of them said, "and if your hand shakes a bit, you might collapse a few spars. Or the wings will come off. It's happened."

It was easy to convince them that my new operational limits were only for use when there was no hope, when, boxed in with nothing to draw upon and nowhere to turn, I would be shot down anyway. The ME-109 pilots knew what we could do, and choreographed their movements accordingly. I was going to surprise them.

Then I had the mechanics build the flaming peacock, which was a steel box cut into the fuselage aft of the cockpit. Instead of the plane's aluminum skin, the surface over the box was a metal plate held in place by a cotter pin. Inside, under a screen to keep it from blowing away, was a magnesium flare surrounded by four condoms full of the worst Tunisian olive oil, and two big paper bags of ground pepper. This was sprinkled with three 50-caliber shells' worth of gunpowder and packed with excelsior.

We tested it on the ground, where it made a disgusting mess, and then in the air, where the great volumes of oxygen and the pressure of the wind helped to create exactly the effect we wanted. First you pulled a line that yanked the cotter pin, and then you pulled another line that set off the flare. The flare exploded the gunpowder, which exploded the olive oil and the pepper, and blew away the plate. A great burst of flame, sparks, burning crap of all kinds, and huge masses of white smoke issued from the peacock, and, as any chef knows, the olive oil just kept on smoking.

I had noticed in my very first engagement that when my opponent fell away from me, wounded, I leveled out and held my fire. It was instinctive, as well as the knightly thing to do. And it was practical: you didn't want to lose altitude and open yourself to attack. Also, you felt constrained to stay within the arena of action. The same impulse that leads a dog to stay within his territory or a bull to stamp the ground led pilots to break off when their opponent was falling toward the sea. The more methodical the pilot, the more likely he would stick to this paradigm, and the pilots of the ME-109's were, thank God, Germans.

The first time I used the peacock I didn't really think it would work. I was coming off Licata, fifty miles out at sea and still in sight of land, with half my fuel and half my ammunition left after strafing an olive grove that concealed a truck park.

Three ME-109's appeared at 9:30 high, two thousand feet above. The one in the center came straight at me in a shallow dive, and his two wingmen broke off to complicate my life. The one in the north rose and then banked to get behind me, and the one in the south dived and began to come up in anticipation of my evasion.

If I looped back to get the plane behind me, I would show my belly to the plane in the center. If I dived to the east, the plane behind me would have his chance—to the west, the plane in front. Meanwhile, the one in the middle was going to get off a good long shot.

The only thing to do was what I did, turn at the center plane and fire a long burst in the hope of diverting him. It worked; he was easily diverted because he knew his wingmen were on me, and he rolled off to his left.

He almost certainly did not think that I would follow, because, if I did, I would have the wingmen on me in a fatal rear lock. But I did follow, and locked in on the center plane, now fleeing from me to no avail. I hit him, and he dropped away, smoking.

In normal usage, I was dead. I had two ME-109's hard on my tail, converging, at different altitudes, firing like mad. They were vengeful and sure, as they should have been. I pulled the cable to the flaming peacock. The door was blown out into the blue, followed by what appeared to be the burning viscera of the plane. I dropped with the distinctive forward jerk of a bird taken on the wing, and let myself fall languidly toward the sea.

They broke off, still tracking me, but from far above. A few feet over the waves, I began an all-out forward run. By the time the peacock went out, I was invisible against the sea and they had turned back. I banked to the left and started to climb. Then I put on the superchargers. By the time I reached altitude, I could hardly see the Messerschmitts. They were nothing more than specks that appeared and disappeared. Had they gone back to their field, I would have missed them, but they continued their patrol, turning west. That would give me a broadside, out of the sun.

I took it. I hit one so hard that he broke up in the air, and the other simply fled. At this point I was very low on fuel and ammunition and I back-rolled for home hoping that the remaining Schmitt would not come back. He didn't.

Just enough fuel was left to skim the beach before landing. We were not supposed to do that, but it was often too enticing not to. It was like shouting out that you were still alive, and your voice was not your voice but the voice of your swift and powerful plane, with an engine that shook the ground, with six cannons, and light wings that rocketed through the clouds. The planes returned as if from nowhere, propellers churning in golden light, avenging angels descending from unimaginable wars in the ether. After my first kill I understood that we were singing a terribly sad song. But I'm not ashamed of having sung that song, for, no matter what you may suspect, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

 

Months of daily patrol made me confident that, despite the narrow margins of my kills, I had been born to shoot down ME-109's. I suppose I thought I had stumbled upon the slight and perpetual edge that is the hallmark of a great athlete. A bicyclist who repeatedly wins the Tour de France by nine or ten seconds after coming from behind and overtaking a customary rival will endorse hot cocoa and stretch pants until the sun burns out. The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life itself is a string of them, like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.

I was on a SLOC patrol north of Benghazi, I had dropped my wing tanks, and was using the last of my loiter time before heading across the top of the Gulf of Sirte back to Monastir.

The sea below was empty and dead, the Libyan Desert still covered with corpses and armor, and the road from Egypt seldom traveled. By that time, German and Italian aircraft hardly ever appeared over the territory from which their armies had been driven, though they had the capacity to do so. They flew from aerodromes in Sicily, particularly one beneath the hill town of Erice, a huge hornets' nest on a checkered and hospitable plain.