Under a War-Torn Sky (3 page)

Henry exhaled a low whistle and began fumbling in the flap pocket of his shirt. He jostled Dan.

“What's worrying you now, flyboy?” the captain asked.

“Just looking for my good luck,” Henry said. He pulled out a beautiful marble. Swirls of red and gold floated just under its surface.

Dan smiled. “I had one of those when I was a kid.”

Henry dropped it into the captain's palm.

“It's a cloud, isn't it?” Dan asked as he rolled it around his hand.

“That's right,” Henry nodded. A cloud was an “end-of-day” marble: a large, one-of-a-kind marble that glassblowers made from leftover glass. “It's my shooter. I won it off my old man. He
always
played by the rules. Even before I was in grade school, I had to shoot knuckles down or I'd lose my turn. And he played for keeps. Whatever he knocked out of the circle, he kept. Even if it was my favourite marble. He'd say,” – Henry adopted a low, gruff drawl – “‘That'll teach you to shoot better, boy.'”

“Nice guy,” said Dan.

Henry paused. “That's Clayton Forester for you. Dad can be…well…kinda harsh. He has his own set of rules for right and wrong. You gotta be a man. When I was eleven years old, my dog, Skippy, got hit by a truck. Skip had been out on the road looking for me to come home from school. I'd told him and told him to stay by the house. He was the best dog, so loyal – a beautiful English setter – but he didn't mind worth a dime.

“That truck hit him hard enough to break both his back legs. Skip was in terrible pain, dragging himself along the ground. Dad said he was my dog, so it was my responsibility to stop his misery.” Henry's voice cracked. “So I got my rifle. And I shot him. Skip died looking at me with those big, trusting brown eyes of his. I don't think I'll ever forgive that old bastard for making me do that.”

Henry took the marble back and looked down at it. “Ma would try to sneak back the marbles Dad won off me when he was asleep. But what I really wanted more than anything was to beat him fair and square. When I was fourteen, I shot this out of the circle and claimed it. It had been Dad's since he was a kid. I used it as my shooter for the rest of that game. And you know what?”

“What?” Dan asked.

“I knocked out every single one of my old man's marbles on one turn. Even his steelies. He about had a fit.” Henry laughed. “So this is my good luck, my cloud. It'll keep me up there in the blue.”

Carefully, Henry put the marble back into his pocket and buttoned it in. He tried to wait patiently for the CO, the commanding officer, to arrive. The exact location of the target wouldn't be revealed until then.

“Tenn-hut!” The fliers stood up, straight and still, as the CO passed to the front podium.

“Be seated, gentlemen,” the CO called out. “Before we show you today's mission I want to congratulate you on the past month. You've done a hard job well. One that had to be done if we ever want to liberate ‘Fortress Europe'.” As he uttered the last two words, the CO stuck his finger under his nose and adopted a thick German accent to make fun of Hitler's term for his empire. The fliers laughed appreciatively.

“Here's what you have accomplished: Air Intelligence tells us that during January, when weather kept us grounded, the Nazis increased their aircraft production to one plane every fifteen minutes. That's four Luftwaffe killers an hour.” He paused to let that number sink in. “We had to break that production before it broke us. That's what all those back-to-back missions in February were about.

“I'd like to give all of you a week's pass to London,” the CO concluded – he held up his hand to stop the men's cheers – “God knows you deserve it. But it's crucial that we weaken the Luftwaffe before General Eisenhower tries a land invasion. Otherwise, thousands and thousands of American boys will die for nothing. We have to push forward to keep the Luftwaffe from regathering its strength.” He sat down and nodded to his S-2, the intelligence officer. The S-2 pulled back the curtain with a flourish.

The red yarn ran across the English Channel to the Belgian coast, took a sharp turn down to France, and ran a long diagonal across it. From there, the yarn skipped along the northern edge of Switzerland to a point in southern Germany. It would be a long, long flight.

Henry and the other airmen shifted in their seats. “Is this trip really necessary?” shouted a smart-mouthed pilot, quoting a gas-conservation slogan well known back in the States.

“Yes, it is, men,” said the S-2. “And let's do it right. Drop the bombs right in the pickle barrel.” He slapped the map with his pointer. “Your target is a ball-bearing plant. Without ball bearings, Messerschmitts can't fly, Rommel's tanks can't roll.”

The S-2 put up a photograph of the factory. The Nazis had tried to hide it among homes, schools, and churches. Accuracy was critical or many civilians would die. The S-2 talked about the number of fighters and flak guns the crews could expect to come up against. It wasn't pretty.

Then the weather officer explained how to deal with the weather. The clouds would be low and broken up as they left England. Once they hit the European mainland, however, cumulus clouds billowed up solid to twenty thousand feet. They'd have to fly over them. The target was overcast but predicted to clear by the time the bombers arrived at 11 a.m. Everything was strategically timed: the moment they'd rally with other bomb groups taking off from bases all over England; the time they were to hit the target.

“Gentlemen,” the CO stood up again to synchronize the men's watches, “here's our time-tick. It is now five-oh-five minus twenty seconds.” The fliers looked down at their watches and set them to 5:05, keeping the stem that started the watch pulled out, waiting for the CO to say,
hack
.

“Five seconds…four…three…two…one,
hack
.” Henry and a hundred other men clicked in their watch stems. Whatever their various fates on this mission, they were tied together in time.

“Let's get some chow,” said Dan after the briefing. They headed to the flying officers' mess hall. There were “combat eggs” this morning, real eggs, not the powdered, green-tinted ones. Henry took mounds of scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes. It would be night before he ate again.

Billy crowded up behind Henry in the food line and banged his tray against Henry's. “Hear you're flying left wing to my plane, farm boy. Make sure you keep that formation tight. Close as I dance with village girls at the pub.”

“Don't worry, Romeo,” said Henry, keeping the tone friendly. “You'll be able to play cards off my wing tip, I'll keep it so close and steady.”

Billy nodded and turned to go. Henry reached out to touch his arm. “Be careful out there in the lead, Billy. The shooting gets thick, you know?”

“Yeah.” Billy tried to smile. “Thanks, Hank.”

Henry sat down with his crew. His food was not inviting. He imagined the warm bacon smell and sizzling sound of his ma's frying pan as she cooked breakfast. She always hummed something as she cooked. What was it?
Amazing Grace
, that was it.

He checked his watch. 5:20. He thought about home at 5:20 a.m. The old man would be back in the house after feeding the chickens. Henry could smell Clayton's cup of acid-strong coffee, hear him dump a spoonful of sugar and stir it rapidly. He'd be clinking the teaspoon against the cup loudly until Lilly gently reached over to still his hand.

Henry thought about Patsy. At 5:20, Patsy would be getting up. Henry wondered how she did, walking to school on her own in the dawning light. They had always quizzed each other on spelling and maths as they walked. Who did that for her now? Her parents never had time for that.

Stop thinking, Henry told himself. He forced down the rest of his breakfast and got up from the table. “Gotta get in line for the escape kits. I'll see y'all at the plane.”

That was one of Henry's duties as copilot, to pick up and distribute the small packages meant to help fliers survive behind enemy lines if they had to bail out. The contents included: one candy bar, one can of food, three syringes of morphine, a compass, a silk map of France, bandages, pills for sterilizing water, and a little French money. There was also a pamphlet with a list of English phrases translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, and German.
I am in a hurry
and
Heil Hitler
were repeated across all four columns. Not much to protect you against the Third Reich, thought Henry.

He waved off a ride in a jeep already overflowing with fliers. He preferred to walk to the landing field and get his head straight. “‘We did it before and we can do it again,'” Henry sang. It was a song that had come out right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. We can do it again. Just another bomb run, Henry. No big deal.

“Got any gum, chum?” asked a small voice.

Henry turned around to see a young boy who lived on the farm next door. The base's runways had been sliced right into the farm's fields. The boy was constantly asking fliers for gum. Food was rationed in England. Meat went to the American and British fliers first. Gum helped trick civilian stomachs to stop rumbling.

Henry knew what it was like to be a child feeling hungry. There had been many days he'd eaten nothing but boiled eggs and bread after the stock market crashed and crushed farm prices. His father and mother had such a hard time making their mortgage payments during the first year of the Depression, they'd only kill a chicken for Sunday dinner, and then only after she'd gotten too old to lay eggs for them to sell.

Henry handed the English boy a stick of gum. “You're not supposed to be on base, you know,” he said.

“You going to tell on me, Yank?” said the boy with a mischievous grin. Henry watched him dart across the fence. The boy's grandfather was already out trying to plough a field with his old carthorse.

Henry reached their B-24 ahead of his crew. He stopped to look her over. The ground crews had patched the baseball-sized holes left by flak on their last run. The olive-coloured Liberator looked clean and ready.
Out of the Blue
was her name. Henry loved the picture painted on her: a fiery red-haired woman dressed in blue sitting atop a cloud and holding a bomb by the tail.

When he had gone on a pass to London, Henry met a lot of B-17 pilots. They made fun of the B-24's odd tail, the two fins popping up off a crossbeam. But the Liberator's slim wing had better aerodynamics than the B-17s. A B-24 could fly faster and higher, with a heavier load of bombs. What Henry and other B-24 pilots didn't like to admit, though, was that the wing's design gave the Liberator a tendency to stall and spin. B-17s, the Flying Fortresses, held up better under battle damage, too. They could even make it back to base on just one of their four engines. If a B-24's wing was hit, the plane went down fast.

Henry reached up to grab the edge of the hatch in the plane's nose. He swung himself up, feet first. He squeezed through the compartment where the engineer operated the turret guns. Then he shimmied into the cockpit's right-hand seat. He had already checked most of the controls when Dan squashed himself in behind the left control wheel.

They began their preflight ritual, crucial to safety, crucial to nerves. Henry followed a procedures list. But the two could have done it in their sleep.

“Set on preflight?” asked Dan.

“Roger,” confirmed Henry.

“Weight and balance?”

“Check.”

“Fuel-boost pumps, valves, switches?”

“Roger, set.”

Following Dan, Henry continued down the list, checking the brakes, and the electrical and hydraulic systems. They tested flaps, throttles, gears, deicers, and generators. Henry flicked a dozen handles and switches on and off, on and off. He verified the oxygen supplies.

Finally, Dan sang out: “All set to fire up?”

“Roger.”

Dan radioed the tower, “All set. Crew, check-in.”

A chorus of checking in followed: Fred and Paul directly below them in the glass cage of the plane's nose; the engineer right behind. Then the radio operator, two waist gunners, ball-turret gunner, and tail gunner. There were ten crew members in all.

Henry and Dan went through more last-minute checks. Then Dan uttered the final question: “Fuel supply and quantity?”

“Check,” answered Henry.

“Start engines.”

Henry pulled the generators. The starter engine popped.

“Mesh!” said Dan.

The number three engine swirled slowly, then faster and faster, until it was a whir.
Out of the Blue
began to wiggle, like a racehorse twitching at the start gate.

“Number two,” called Dan.

The left inside engine snorted blue smoke and spun into action. The plane hummed and rattled.

Dan and Henry let the plane creep out to the take-off point to join the twenty-three other planes. They bucked against their brakes, ready to hurtle down the runway. Dan fired engine one, then engine four.

Henry watched for the flare from Flying Control. If he saw a green-red combination that meant the mission was a go, but they weren't cleared yet for takeoff. If it was red-red, the raid was called off. If it was green-green, they were on their way to Germany.

A sequence of green-green balls of light spat over the runway.

“Okay, crew,” Dan said over the intercom. “Ready for takeoff.”

He and Henry pushed all four throttles forward. Overloaded with five-hundred-pound bombs and almost three thousand gallons of fuel,
Out of the Blue
shuddered and convulsed as she roared along the airstrip. There was just barely enough pavement to get her up into the air and over the oak trees that stood at the end of the runway. They could easily smash into those trees and explode.

“Come on, baby, come on,” whispered Henry.

Right behind them was another bomb-filled plane, due to take off a mere thirty seconds after they did. There was absolutely no room for error. Henry glanced over at Dan and saw his jaw muscles twitching.