The Last Mission Read online

  Most telling is the fact that he received special protection from his military commander to assure that he would never be identified and apprehended. He was confined to his quarters under pretense of combat fatigue and then transferred back to the States. This was at a time when there was a critical shortage of flyers and when no one was being sent home, not even those who had completed their tour of missions.

  McTiernan was moved out of your jurisdiction before I was involved in the case. I tell you this so that you will know I agree with your view that justice should be served despite the wartime conditions. I had nothing to do with interfering with the due process of law. Since we have identified the criminal, we might consider that justice has been served, and accept that the man’s punishment will be the lifelong burden of his terrible crime.

  Respectfully,

  Lt. James Marron

  USAAF

  Martin Browning is still staring at me, even after I have folded the letter back into its envelope. When I look up at him he asks, “Do you know what happened to Lieutenant McTiernan?”

  I shake my head slowly. “I never tried to find out. I assume he returned to his civilian life, just like the rest of us. I couldn’t have instigated charges without the Army records that they never would have given me. Your father would have been helpless without U.S. military cooperation, and that wouldn’t have been given while we were fighting a war, and probably not after the war when we were getting out of England as fast as we could. So I think we have to leave it that both Mary and Roger were victims of the war.”

  “Well, perhaps I will find someone to edit the material. Maybe there would be a market for my father’s experiences.”

  I agree heartily, even though I doubt it would be of any great interest, but it doesn’t really matter, because Martin will never get it ready for publishing. I don’t think he is interested in anything that might upset his routine.

  From Norwich I drive out to the Wash and King’s Lynn. When I first took Angela there, it seemed to be a day’s outing, but that was on the narrow dirt road in a car with a lawn-mower motor for an engine. My lease car is overpowered and the road is four divided lanes of blacktop. I’m there in half an hour.

  The inn, to my delight, looks nearly unchanged, and I park the car and rush in eagerly. Inside, everything is different. To the left, where the sitting room offered uninterrupted quiet, there is a good-sized bar where business types are oiling up for lunch. The laughter and loud voices seem almost obscene. To the right, the dining room is nearly twice as large as I remember, with pale tablecloths and elaborate settings. The place has been turned into a restaurant, and an expensive one at that.

  “Do you have a reservation?” The question comes in a polite voice from a young woman in a black dress and good jewelry.

  “No…no…” I blurt back, still dumbstruck by the changes.

  “You’re meeting someone?” She is looking frantically at her reservation plan.

  “I wouldn’t be listed. I just stopped in.”

  “For lunch?” Her tone is as amazed as if I had stopped in for brain surgery.

  “No. I just wanted to see…” My gesture takes in the whole ground floor. “I was here before, many years ago.”

  She has no idea of how many, so I add, “Before you were born, I’ll bet.”

  Slowly, she shows the trace of a smile. “During the war…you’re an American, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, and it was during the war. Winter of 1944, to be exact.”

  “Oh, dear. I hope you haven’t come to complain.” Then she laughs generously. “Just help yourself. Look around.”

  I walk to the bar, find a space, and order a gin on the rocks. It’s the nearest thing in England to a martini. The bartender serves mechanically, too rushed to care about anyone he is serving. Slowly, I slump over the glass.

  Why am I here? I wonder. Exactly what in hell am I looking for? Of course everything is changed. The world doesn’t keep monuments to anyone’s first love and, over time, not even to his last love. The base is now a housing development. The planes and their engines have long since rusted away. The men, for the most part, are dead and buried. All I have is now, and very little of it left. I’ll finish the gin, which could stand a few more ice cubes, and then head back.

  Names are called, and in response men toss down their drinks and file into the dining room. I’m finishing my own when the young lady in black appears next to me.

  “Sorry, but you caught me at my busiest moment.”

  “Then I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “You were here when we were a hotel?”

  “Well, a very small hotel. More of a guest house.”

  “I’ve heard that we were still letting rooms until the eighties,” she says, “but then a Holiday Inn moved in, and a small Marriott opened just a few miles back.”

  “There was a woman at the desk. Probably the owner…”

  “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about the people. I’ve been here only a few years. But it wouldn’t be the same family. We’re a public company. French, actually. We bought the place from a German company.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. I was just in the area and I happened to remember the place. From the outside it looks pretty much the same.”

  “The second floor probably hasn’t changed much either. All the renovations are here in the dining area.”

  “There are still rooms upstairs?”

  “Not for rent. We just store things in them. Linen, china, liquor, and our groceries.”

  “But the rooms are unchanged?”

  She thinks for an instant. “Unchanged since I’ve been here. Probably a lot longer than that.” She reads the sudden excitement in my eyes. “Would you like to go up and have a look? It’s not tidy, but it is clean. We’re up and down every day.”

  I finish the drink in an instant and follow her up the stairs.

  At the top of the steps there’s a sign for the WC, with an arrow aimed to the left. The space over the sitting room, now the bar, has been transformed into two restrooms. She fits a key into the deadbolt lock on the door to the right, opens it and then switches on the light. And there it is, trapped in time. The once-dark hallway with guest-room doors that still have room numbers on them. I walk to the second door and rest my hand on the knob.

  “May I?”

  “Of course, but it’s just dry-goods storage.”

  I open and am immediately up to my shoulders in stacked cartons of canned goods, paper supplies, and cleaning materials. I recognized the beam ceiling, the leaded window, and the door up a step to the bathroom.

  “This was your room?”

  I nod. “Just for a weekend.”

  “A special weekend?”

  “A honeymoon.”

  “You were married here, in England?”

  “At the time I thought so. But then things changed.”

  She smiles mischievously, certain she knows what happened.

  “It was very different then,” I correct her. “But I don’t think I can explain the difference, probably not even to myself.”

  I take a last look around, refurnishing the room mentally. I linger at the bathroom door and can see Angela stepping out in what she intended to be her wedding gown. I complete the tour and find myself facing my hostess. “Thanks very much. It brings back some pleasant memories.” She steps back and I close the door behind me. On the way down the stairs, I ask her if she can handle one more for lunch.

  I drive out to the lot behind the housing development and stand where the control tower stood. In the distance I can see the stand of trees that were at the end of our main runway. They’re much taller now, probably because no one is flying over them and trimming them with propeller blades. I can hear distant traffic noises, a door slam, and a young child’s whining voice. God, when we all taxied out and revved the engines to check magnetos, you couldn’t hear yourself think. It was the feel of the vibration that told you when you were at maximum
power.

  I park at the inn and walk back down to Bridge Street for one last glance at her house. It’s been modernized. Not much to remember here. I wonder what happened to the piss-yellow Austin. When I left, I gave the papers to the motor pool sergeant. I hope it served him well.

  In my room, I try another call to Todd and hear a replay of the same surly message. Then I call Kit and get her just as she’s finishing her lunch. Bob Bacon, she tells me, has filed an appeal of the sentence. A man who buys a few weeds every couple of years, he argued, shouldn’t be doing a year in jail. The prosecutor, he claimed, was hostile.

  “Does he think it will work?”

  “He isn’t sure, but he’s spent a lot of your money demonstrating that no occasional user has been sentenced to more that thirty days in the last five years.”

  “Worth every penny. Tell him to pour it on. I’ll be flying back to New York tomorrow. I’ll call you when I get in.”

  I pack my bag, leaving slacks and a sport shirt for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s journey, then I take my power nap, splash water on my face, and head downstairs for dinner and drinks.

  I’m still working on my fish when Herbert Little comes in and takes his place at the bar. I set my coffee down next to him and order a brandy as my nightcap. Arthur adds a brandy for himself.

  I recap my day for them. Arthur seems pleased that I made the rounds of all my memorabilia and have gotten my affairs in order. Herbert seems agitated, playing with his drink, the napkin, and a box of wooden matches. “It means so much to you, Mr. Marron. I don’t understand how you can just walk away without even talking to the woman.”

  “Or how you could have…the first time,” Arthur adds.

  How could I? It’s hard to explain. “I didn’t have much choice the first time. I had a set of orders: ‘There’s a plane leaving in two hours. Be on it.’ I had to catch the plane.”

  Neither of them looks very sympathetic, but why would they be? Neither of them has ever lived on a military base. Neither of them ever flew a bombing mission over Germany. To them, life is something you generally control. Oh, there’s always the unexpected—the winning lottery ticket or the crippling disease. But they haven’t lived with something totally random. Like the trajectory of a tiny shard of steel in the explosion of an antiaircraft shell.

  Then

  We were going back to Regensburg. Our first try, almost six months earlier, had been a disaster with over 20 percent of our planes lost and another 20 percent seriously damaged. Now, the odds were much more in our favor, but still no one was looking forward to the return trip.

  Regensburg was the site of Germany’s largest aircraft-manufacturing plant: the enormous Messerschmitt works. The factory covered several thousand acres, with an enormous production line at its center and some seventy outbuildings that housed machine shops, engineering floors, and parts inventory. There was also a single airstrip. The finished products coming off the production line were flown directly to combat units.

  The Me-109, Germany’s first modern fighter, was still in production at Regensburg. Enough flew out each morning to replace most of the 109s that had been shot down the previous day. The plant also produced the Me-110, a twin-engine fighter regarded by Allied analysts as a failure, but the analysts weren’t flying B-17s into Germany. The 110s had enough range to hang around forever and enough firepower to make them very unwelcome guests.

  Important as eliminating these two planes was, Regensburg stood well above the horizon line for another reason: Messerschmitt was reported to be building a totally new kind of fighter that we later found out was the world’s first jet-propelled combat aircraft. What we knew at the time was that it was one hundred miles per hour faster than anything we had, climbed twice as fast, and packed a very heavy armament. The German jet would be more than a match for our Mustangs. Without the Mustangs, we went back to being chopped liver. All these reasons made Regensburg our prime target. There were other reasons why we didn’t want to go there.

  Take a look at a map. Regensburg, you will find, is in the southeastern sector of Germany, closer to Prague than it is to Frankfurt. The round trip was just shy of twelve hundred miles. That was farther than a fully loaded B-17 could fly if it climbed to its highest altitude. Compromises had to be made, and these gave us any number of mission profiles.

  We could fly lighter. Instead of carrying three or four tons of bombs, we could go down to one or two tons. Each ton we shed would add about 250 miles to our range. Or we could fly lower. We used up nearly a third of our fuel capacity climbing to twenty-eight thousand feet. If we settled for twenty thousand feet, the saving in gasoline would add about three hundred miles to our range. You could argue it either way. If we left enough bombs on the ground, we would simply have to go back again in order to complete the job. On the other hand, if we kept to a lower altitude, within the range of antiaircraft guns and a shorter climb for our opponents, fewer of us would get there at all. How did we have the best chance of destroying our target with the fewest losses? In one absolutely awful mission, or in two simply dangerous missions?

  Our fighter escorts were dealing with similar arithmetic, but with the added consideration of pilot fatigue. The raid would take four hours to get there and three hours to get back, the difference being the time it took to climb to altitude. For the Mustang pilot, that meant seven hours of uninterrupted concentration. There was no copilot to spell him.

  The map also shows other reasons why Regensburg was a synonym for hell. Because we were operating at the limits of our range, we couldn’t use evasive routing. We had to fly to the target in a nearly straight line. That line took us just south of the Ruhr, Germany’s heavily defended industrial region, bristling with antiaircraft guns and spotted with fighter airfields. As we passed the Ruhr, we would be a row of ducks gliding across the back wall of a shooting gallery. Farther down the line we would fly close to Frankfurt, another region with strong aerial defenses. A mission to Regensburg was like three missions. You had to fight your way through ground fire and fighter attacks three times. The third time, Regensburg itself, was the worst.

  There were four separate fighter fields that would have at least an hour’s warning that we were coming. The Messerschmitts wouldn’t have to climb up to meet us. They would be up there in force, awaiting our arrival. There were also fifty antiaircraft guns in the area, according to our military intelligence. That meant flak would be everywhere. Avoiding it would be as difficult as trying to fly through a screen door.

  The British had tried Regensburg at night. They flew fast twin-engine Mosquitoes in at dusk to find the factory visually and drop incendiary bombs. The heavier, slower Lancasters were to come in under the cover of darkness, use the fires started by the incendiaries as their target, and unload their cavernous bomb bays, but the Germans had seen this tactic many times before. They had the fires out within an hour, then they used searchlights to illuminate the wandering bombers and slaughtered them with antiaircraft fire. The Lancasters suffered terrible losses, and their enormous bomb loads created a canyon almost a mile long, but five miles away from the Messerschmitt factory.

  The British and American brass agreed. Night bombing wasn’t going to get the job done. It had to be a daylight raid where the factory could be locked in the crosshairs. That meant us. The Americans were the only ones who flew during the day, and we would travel light in order to get as high as possible over the target. Only six bombs per plane. That meant we had to be deadly accurate. This was going to be a rifle shot; buckshot weighed too much.

  We waited for perfect weather, where we could see the individual buildings from twenty-eight thousand feet and lock our sights on the central production line. Once again, all communications with the outside world were cut off. Once we knew where we were going, no one would be allowed to leave the base.

  It was late March, 1944. The weather was iffy at best. If we were in the clear, it was snowing in Bavaria. When Regensburg was clear, we were socked in. There were a
ctually a couple of OSS guys living near the factory who kept us appraised of the local weather. They also kept us posted on the progress with the new Messerschmitt jet fighter. Two prototypes were already flying. Unless we wanted to meet them in squadron force sometime during the summer, we had better get to Regensburg right now.

  We waited for five days, more than enough time to calculate the percentage of us who wouldn’t make the round trip. Four of the pilots spent a couple of hours pitching horseshoes. One of them probably wouldn’t make it back. There was a touch football game among the crews. Seven, maybe eight of the players would vanish over Regensburg.

  People began leaving letters home with crewmembers from other planes, people they didn’t really know. But you had to play the odds. Your best friend was probably in your own crew, and if you went down, he was going to be going down with you. Best to leave your farewell letters with people on half a dozen different planes. One of them had to make it back.

  Carberry always gave me the same letter in the crinkled envelope, and then I gave it back to him when we landed. He wrote to his Alice every day, in words of hope and good cheer, filled with illusions of the long life they would have together. Michael never said anything about the dangers or about his fears. “No sense in ruining her day,” he often explained. “Her mailbox is about half a mile from her front porch, and she always walks down to wait for the mailman. Then she reads the letter on the way back, or at least that’s how she says it goes. I want to have her smiling when she gets to her front door.”

  Just once he had spelled out the things that were important to him. He had told her that he loved her and would always love her. Nothing could have made him leave her—except this damn war. She knew he could never live with himself if he didn’t do his part, and she would always be with him. But if anything happened to him, he didn’t want her to be sad. “Don’t hang around moping! That’s the last thing I would want for you. Get out! Meet people! Live a happy life!” The guy was going off to be slaughtered, and all he could think about was his girl’s life. He wanted someone to make her happy, even if it turned out that it couldn’t be him.