Sons (34 page)

“Take-off time is 0845,” the major said. “Your route is as follows: base to forty-four ten north, twenty twenty cast to Kragujevac to Paracin to forty-three fifty-two north, twenty-one twenty-four cast to last landfall at Albanian-Yugoslav coastal border to base. ETA at rendezvous is 1000 hours, altitude 21,500 to 22,000 feet. Radio silence, of course, until you’re over the target,” he said, which was the cue, as it was at every briefing, for the group’s meteorologist to step up with the day’s weather report. Captain Rutherford was a moon-faced little man with a pencil-line mustache and a high reedy voice. He invariably read the weather report like a radio announcer doing a thirty-second spot following the news, as if totally unaware that one or another of us had earlier flown a recon mission over the target to gather the information, the enemy being extremely chary about letting us know when it was okay to bomb. If the skies were dear, Rutherford sounded as though he were reporting the good news to thousands of housewives anxious to go out shopping, rather than to a collection of sleepy-eyed pilots who were dragging ass and hoping for fog over the target. When he said, as he did now, “Stratus at 2000 feet over Dubrovnik and the offshore islands,” we ladies of Lake Shore Drive knew he really meant it was raining lightly there, “clearing rapidly inland approximately midway to target, cirro-cumulus at 24,000 to 26,000 over the Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo area, ceiling and visibility unlimited.” He smiled, pleased with his delivery; in a mimeographed Intops Summary, the weather would probably be reported later as simply CAVU. Rutherford nodded in dismissal, took a seat behind the table, and did not look up when Captain Schulz (who we all insisted was a Nazi spy, even though he was our own Intelligence Officer) came forward to give us our flak and enemy aircraft information. This was the part we always listened to very closely. With the back of his hand, Schulz brushed a hank of straight blond hair off his forehead, blinked at the assembled pilots, consulted a scrap of brown paper so tiny that we were certain he would swallow it as soon as he had read us the information on it, and then matter-of-fact said, “Flak reported on mission route week of September 10 as follows: Stolak and Bileca, light to medium; Pljevlja, heavy; Priboj, intermittent light; extremely heavy over target area and in Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo triangle. Suggest alternate headings to avoid Pljevlja batteries. Very little E/A activity this past week, though eight Me 109s were sighted ten miles southeast of Sarajevo, at five thousand feet, no markings. Eighth Air Force has reported sighting jets again, but the possibility of any in Yugoslavia is extremely slight; whatever comes at you from Belgrade/Zemun or possibly Novi Sad will be conventional aircraft. You’ll probably have a lot of stragglers coming off the target, plenty to keep you busy on the way home. If you’re shot down...” (We all stopped listening here, because this was the part we heard at each and every briefing, reiterated for all of us idiot pilots who were only flying an airplane that cost a quarter of a million dollars and who had been trained at an expense of another couple of hundred thousand dollars, but who were too dumb to know what we were supposed to do if we got shot down, unless it was repeated seven days a week) “... properly and with respect if you’re picked up by the Luftwaffe, hostilely if the ground forces get you, and extremely badly if the Gestapo does. Check your sidearm before take-off, make sure you’ve got your packet of money, your first-aid kit” (ho-hum) “your emergency rations, and your knife. If you’re forced down, you’re under orders to destroy the airplane. If you bail out, get rid of your parachute.” Schulz looked at his little brown piece of paper again, and then sat down. Major Dimple came forward.

“All right,” he said, “here are your plane assignments,” and began reading off the names of the pilots and the numbers of the planes they would be flying into Yugoslavia. Our group was always briefed together, which meant that there were forty-eight pilots assembled in the church that morning. The 94th Squadron had twenty-five pilots in it, but no more than sixteen of us went up on any mission, four flights — White, Red, Blue, and Yellow — with four P-38s in each flight. Today, only fourteen of us were going, in flights of four, four, three, and three. Not every pilot had the same plane assigned to him for every strike, but Ace and I were lucky in that respect, flying the identical plane each time, a privilege usually reserved only for senior pilots. (We naturally considered those airplanes our own, and were terribly annoyed when they were assigned to other pilots for a mission we were not flying.) On both nacelles of Ace’s airplane, he had painted four spread playing cards, all aces, and the name
Aces High
stenciled in a semicircle above them. My plane was called
Tyler’s Luck,
a bastardization of the comic strip
Tim Tylers Luck,
and the design on my engines featured blond Tim and black-haired Spud, both grinning. Anyway, since Ace and I
knew
which planes we’d be flying, we stopped listening again, until the major said, “Check your timepieces,” and then hesitated, watching the sweep-hand, and then said, “It’s oh-eight-seventeen, good luck, gentlemen,” which we never felt he really meant.

Captain Kepler, who had been assigned squadron leader for this mission, gave us a brief talk outside the church, telling us what altitude he wanted to fly at to rendezvous, and setting our courses and speeds. He told us again that he didn’t want any noise until we were over the target, and then he looked at his watch, said, “Okay, guys,” and walked off to get a second cup of coffee in the mess hall. Ace and I went to the latrine because this would be our last opportunity to do so (we rarely used the pilot’s relief tube) until sometime this afternoon. Then he went for his good luck cup of coffee, and I went back to the tent to dress.

The weather was still mild on the ground, but it would be something like eighty degrees below zero outside the airplane at 30,000 feet, and even though the P-38 was equipped with a heating tube, the temperature in the cockpit rarely rose to above fifty-five degrees. The Air Force also had a heated flying suit complete with an electric plug that fit into a cockpit jack, but the suit shrank when you washed it, and as a result only the smallest guys in the squadron flew in anything like heated comfort. So I always wore long johns, over which I pulled on a pair of khaki pants and shirt, and then coveralls, and then my leather fleece-lined jacket. I never wore the leather helmet because it got too uncomfortable on a long flight, preferring the poplin instead. I took very good care of my hands and my feet because those were the parts of the body that really began to ache after a while (those and the coccyx; you were sitting on the valve of a Mae West throughout the entire mission). I had bought a pair of fleece-lined boots from a British officer for twenty bucks, and those were what I wore on each raid, together with a pair of woolen, flannel-lined, sweater-cuffed GI gloves. Still, my hands and feet were always cold.

Sergeant Balson was standing alongside the plane when I came up to the flight line at about eight-thirty. He had already started her, and he stood listening to the engines now, bald head cocked to one side, the way my mother used to listen, though the crew chief was not the slightest bit deaf. Hands on hips, wearing coveralls and a wool cap, he kept listening to the engines as I approached, and then, without a word of greeting, said, “She seems to be warming up slowly, sir, missing a few times, but she’s sound, don’t worry. The left engine throttle lever is loose. And the trim-tab on the right is pulling a little hard.”

“Anything else, Ballsy?”

“That’s it, sir, have a good flight.”

“Thank you. See you later.”

“Right, sir.”

I went up the ladder onto the wing. The P-38 was not a small airplane. It weighed 17,500 pounds combat-loaded and 14, 100 pounds when the cannon and machine guns were taken out of the nose for an unarmed weather recon flight. Either way, it was a huge hunk of machinery for one man to take into the air, and I always climbed into that cockpit with a sense of apprehension, knowing that my full concentration would be demanded for the next several hours, and knowing that I would come back to the field with a pounding headache. The P-38 cruised at close to 270 miles an hour, as fast as the Mustang or the Thunderbolt, except at high altitudes, and even though I rarely experienced a sense of speed in the air (all of us were weaving over the bombers at the same speed, throttles set), I nonetheless recognized that I was hurtling through the sky at very high velocity, especially when we passed a stationary cloud mass and the point was suddenly and forcefully driven home, and I knew that the only things keeping me aloft were those twin 1600 horsepower Allisons and my own intelligence. So I constantly listened to every sound, reacted to every vibration, every alien ping, knowing instantly if an engine was missing or an instrument was off, preparing to deal with any malfunction that threatened to drop me to the ground — and that alone could give a man a goddamn headache, even if he didn’t have the Luftwaffe and the flak to worry about.

On the ground, though, the airplane was nothing less than beautiful. Looking at her head-on, you saw three huge, thrusting silver bullets, the forwardmost one being the canopied cockpit with its lethal nose, on either side of which were the engine nacelles with their three-bladed airscrews. From wing tip to wing tip, the ship measured fifty-two feet, which meant that once inside the cockpit, you were looking out past the flanking engines onto twenty-six feet of metal on either side of you. It was nice to have two engines in case one decided to quit or was helped to quit by the GAF; it was also nice to have that 23-mm Madsen cannon in the nose surrounded by four 50-caliber machine guns, which was, to be modest, exceptionally heavy armament. The engine booms tapered like torpedos back to the twin fin-and-rudder tail assembly, with the main undercarriage wheels jutting from the twin booms, just back of the wings. Those wings were six feet off the ground when the plane was sitting on the flight line. The over-all impression was one of enormous size and power.
Tyler’s Luck,
the legend read — Amen.

If there was anything that characterized the flight-line wait before take-off, it was our absolute silence. There was no radio chatter between the pilots, no need even for the formality of tower clearance. At precisely 0845, the leader of White Flight thundered down the runway and took off, followed by his wingman seconds later, and then by the element leader and his wingman. I was the element leader of Red Flight. With Ace Gibson on my wing, I taxied onto the wire mesh landing mat, following the two planes ahead, and did a final run-up check, propeller switches in AUTOMATIC, governors in full-forward take-off position, magnetos at 2300 rpm, toes holding hard on the hydraulic brakes. I pulled the left governor back until I got a reduction of 200 rpm, and then returned it to the full-forward take-off position, making sure I got 2300 rpm again. Then I checked out the electrical system — voltmeter approximately twenty-eight volts, ammeter charging below fifty amps. I was ready. As White Flight circled the field overhead, waiting to be joined by the rest of the squadron, I thought This is number nineteen, thirty-one missions to go, and then Archie Colombo, leading Red Flight, poured on the juice.

At 0848, I was airborne.

The people of Foggia did not like P-38 pilots. This made it difficult to form any alliances with girls, and so we were extremely lucky to get Francesca. The reason they did not like P-38 pilots was that the Air Force had repeatedly bombed the railway marshaling yards when the town was still held by the enemy, and the villagers had repeatedly repaired the damage done in the raids until finally the Air Force dropped leaflets telling them to stop fixing the yards or the town itself would be bombed. The Italians went right ahead with their reconstruction work after the next raid, so the Air Force naturally sent in its P-38s to bomb and strafe Foggia. Whereas
we
were in no way connected with those long-ago pilots who had done the dirty deed, the moment a girl from Foggia found out you flew a P-38, you were dead. It didn’t pay to lie, either, because they knew more about the Air Force than the Air Force did itself, and they could tell (by which field you were stationed at in the Foggia complex) whether you flew a bomber or a fighter. Moreover, the 94th Fighter Squadron was one of the few Air Force units permitted to wear an additional piece of jewelry above the silver pilot’s wings: our identifying squadron insignia, a top hat in a ring. Fifty-cent pieces were very difficult to come by on the base, because enterprising machinists were turning them into this insignia jewelry, which was then traded to pilots for anything from two or three fresh eggs to a half-dozen cigars. But if you wore the insignia over your wings, it immediately identified you as one of those hated P-38 pilots who had shot up the town, and instantly brought pride in one’s squadron into direct conflict with one’s natural desire to get laid.

Francesca either hadn’t heard about those fearsome P-38 pilots of yore or simply did not give a damn. We had met her on the road one day while we were trying to hitch a ride into town, all the jeeps having disappeared by the time Ace and I got out of debriefing. Our flight leader and his wingman had been shot down in a raid over Odertal, and Ace and I, presumably having witnessed every enemy pass, had been detained to answer Major Dimple’s interminable questions, Were they in flames, Did they hit the deck, Did you see silk? and so on. Francesca was not exactly what one would have called a beauty, but she was a girl, and she was
there.
She came down the road on a bicycle, rare for these parts, since the Germans had taken with them almost anything that had wheels, wearing open sandals, one of those flowered housedresses with buttons down the front, and a threadbare black cardigan sweater fastened only at the throat and flapping loose around her shoulders like a short cape. She was a chunky girl with curly black hair and brown eyes, a lot of hair under the armpits, some on the legs, but then again, even the higher-type broads in Rome hadn’t learned to shave like American women. Ace hailed her and asked her in English if she would give us a ride to town, and she smiled in a shy, frightened manner and shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she did not speak English, which we later learned was an absolute falsehood. She spoke English as well as any other Italian in Foggia, in fact better; she had been shacking up for some three months with a bomber pilot who caught very heavy shit over Budapest and had never been heard from since. She also told us later that she was afraid of us that first day on the road because she thought we might rape her, and had pretended not to speak English so that she could listen to and understand everything we were saying and therefore be forewarned if we decided to jump her. If we had any designs at the moment, however, they were on her bicycle and not her hot little body. We kept waving our hands around and trying to explain to her that we wanted a ride into town, and finally Ace demonstrated a method whereby the three of us could share the bike, he sitting on the seat and pedaling, she sitting sidesaddle on the crossbar, and me straddling the rack over the rear wheel, legs sticking out almost parallel to the ground, a system that worked for a distance of perhaps six feet before we all fell into the ditch at the side of the road, Francesca displaying a great deal of inviting white thigh as her dress went up over her tumbling legs. I think it was then that we decided she might not be so bad to fuck.