The Last Mission Read online

  I thought seriously about a letter to Angela, which is evidence of where my heart was. I didn’t think about a note to Kay, or even to my parents. But I never wrote her. Like Michael, I didn’t want to say anything that would cast her as the grieving widow, nor did I want to be brightly cheerful. Alice had never seen Michael’s hands shake, but Angela had seen me use two hands to steady a glass. She had read the fear in my eyes and in my bouts of morose silence. Cheery stories would be an insult to the concern she had for me. We were in love now. That was all that mattered. Neither of us could control where events were leading us. References to our long and happy life together were out of place.

  Then came the day. The forecast for East Anglia was partly cloudy, light winds from the northeast, and complete clearing during the day. The coded message from the OSS guys said Regensburg was clear and sunny, the first springlike day of the year: perfect conditions for seeing the Messerschmitt assembly line from twenty-eight thousand feet. We would take off at first light. We would assemble over East Anglia at sixteen thousand feet, plenty of room to establish the spacing among our boxes. Then we would start across the channel, climbing to twenty-four thousand feet before we crossed into Belgium, and reaching twenty-eight thousand feet as we crossed the German border.

  I slept fitfully, tossing and turning and cursing every bump in my mattress. I was still awake at midnight, and awake again at three a.m. Reveille blasted me out of my one moment of deep sleep. I dressed in heavy long johns, wool socks, and a knit sweater under my uniform trousers and shirt. I carried my leather flight jacket over my shoulder and walked to the dining hall.

  The food announced a dangerous mission. They were doing eggs to order instead of dipping a yellow glob out of a pot. Sausages were sizzling on a grill and the aroma of real coffee filled the air. A last meal for the condemned. Ironic, because the lump in your throat before a mission made eating difficult. If the cooks were pilots, today would be cold cereal and a banana. They would hold the eggs and the sausage for tomorrow, when the survivors would show up hungry.

  The other guys were arriving—some on bicycles from their quarters at the far side of the field, some atop a train of bomb haulers that happened to be heading in their direction. They moved quietly onto the chow line, rubbing the circulation back into their fingers and nodding greetings to one another. Everyone was quiet and subdued; the same lump in the throat that made eating difficult also prevented laughter.

  “Cold out. Bet it will be a bitch at twenty-eight thousand.”

  “What do you want to bet that the one cloud over the continent is covering Regensburg?”

  “Not the whole city. Just the damn Messerschmitt factory.”

  “A sunny-side egg! Guess that means I’m a goner.”

  “I can hear my engines misfiring already.”

  We moved from the line to the tables. Some picked at their breakfasts. Others pushed the plate aside and tried to drink the coffee without shaking it out of the cup.

  “I got a bad feeling about this one.”

  “You got a bad feeling about all of them.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should be in intelligence. They feel good about everything.”

  “That’s because they’re too intelligent to fly over Germany themselves.”

  Broken eggs and half-finished sausages were left on the tables or dumped into the trash barrels. We made our way to the command offices for the final briefing. There was a hint at sunrise in the eastern sky.

  Major Berenson, the planning officer, stood on the stage in front of a curtain. General Simons sat in the first row, chewing on a cigar and trying to look like General LeMay. Colonel Mast stood in the back corner of the room. He would have a comment for each of the pilots as we passed by him at the end of the briefing. We filed in quietly and took our seats.

  Berenson pulled the curtain away from a map of Western Europe, everything across from London to Prague and, top to bottom, between Copenhagen and Milan. There were colored ribbons leaving a dozen of the bases in East Anglia and radiating out in all directions to the scattered staging areas where squadrons formed up into groups. Then several of the lines converged at a point over the channel, the major assembly area where the groups became sixty-plane combat wings. From there, four ribbons ran parallel to Regensburg, each representing one wing in the 250-plane mission.

  There was another cluster of lines moving out of and heading south to an assembly area over Dover. These were the Mustang escort fighters that would meet us at the French-Belgian border just as we entered Germany. Not on the map was an attack by P-47 Thunderbolts that would hit the continent a half-hour ahead of us. They would attack coastal targets, and then hang around to see us safely to our rendezvous with the Mustangs.

  All this was precisely timed, the squadrons leaving their airfields according to distance from the assembly area. Our commanders would set their watches according to a broadcast signal that synchronized all the bases, then they would lead us through the motions of synchronizing all our watches. The process was dramatic, but generally useless. A blown tire, a runaway engine, or even a dark cloud inevitably put us behind schedule. In bad weather, planes that were supposed to assemble into tight formations sometimes couldn’t find one another. On most raids we made up the details as we went along.

  The briefing also revealed the radio frequencies that we would use. Everyone would copy the raid frequency that was for the exclusive use of the raid commander. Then there was the group frequency that Mast used to ride herd on us. And the squadron frequency so I could talk to the planes around me and our gun crews could call out the bearings of approaching fighters. Frequencies were changed every mission and publicized only minutes before takeoff. This was supposed to keep our communications secure from the enemy, but half the time we could hear the German pilots talking on the same frequencies we were using. They were safe because none of us spoke German, and probably few of them were fluent in English. That was all the security anyone needed.

  Next came our alternative targets in case the Messerschmitt factory was under cloud cover. We would reverse course with two of the wings going to a railroad yard near Frankfurt, and the rest flying further north to hit a hydraulics plant in the Ruhr.

  Our safe haven was Switzerland. Planes that were shot up and couldn’t make it back to the coast should head for Switzerland, where the aircraft would be confiscated and the crew interned until the end of the war.

  The general rose to tell us that this was the most important mission of the war—it wasn’t—and that he hoped we would all make it back safely—we wouldn’t.

  “Any questions?”

  There were none. We stood and filed out the back door, where Colonel Mast had something for each of his pilots. “Adams, try to fly the same heading as the rest of us.” “Battapaglia, don’t make me give flying lessons over the radio.” “Reed, if you keep hiding under Schneider, he’s going to drop his bombs on you.” “Emerson, if you crowd me again, I’m going to turn my guns on you.” He was making his point. No matter what the generals or the operations officers or the meteorologists might tell us, he was the one we had to answer to. And God help the pilot who annoyed him. There was a joke that some of our pilots bailed out into a German prison camp rather than come home and face Colonel Mast.

  “Hey, Jim!” It was Carberry running up behind me. “Take this for me, okay.”

  It was the tattered envelope addressed to Alice.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You got one for me to carry?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet, Michael, but soon. I’ll figure out what I want to say and who I want to say it to.”

  He smiled. “Jesus, Marron, everyone on the base knows who you want to say it to.”

  “Then all I have to figure out is what I want to say.”

  We tapped our fists on top of each other’s, like children playing one-potato. “See ya,” he said.

  “See ya,” I answered.

  We went our separate ways and then assembled wi
th our crews at our planes. I led the customary walking inspection around the bomber to make sure that all the pieces were together, all the clamps and ties removed from movable surfaces, all the oil and ammunition ports shut tightly, then I walked under the nose and lifted myself up through the hatch. The crew followed me aboard.

  I put on the leather flight jacket and then the bulletproof vest that was supposed to save me from flak. Fur-lined boots went over my shoes. I used a knitted hat that I rolled down over the tops of my ears and pulled the leather flying helmet over that. Then Randlett and I started through our checklists. We ran radio checks on all our assigned frequencies, polled the crew on the intercom, and tested our oxygen masks. In the rote procedures, I forgot for a few moments that I was terrified.

  A flare shot up over the treetops, followed instantly by an order to start our engines. Bruce Firkins, who had checked tanks and powered up fuel pumps, nodded that we were ready. And then, one by one, the big radial Cyclones came back to life. Firkins tuned their screeching down to a dull rumble and we began rolling out into line.

  We came around the trees, and I could see the lines of planes plodding toward the runway. The first squadron pulled out onto the apron. The next squadron jockeyed into position to take their places. Engines roared as the planes closest to the runway ran their magneto checks. Then came another flare that started the first plane into its takeoff run. The second B-17 was rolling before the first lifted off, and the third was rolling when the first cleared the trees. All eighteen planes in the group were in the air six minutes after the takeoff flare was fired.

  The climb to altitude wasn’t nearly as quick. With the engines running full and the props at high power pitch, it took twenty minutes to reach a fifteen-thousand-foot assembly area. On route, we followed the tail of the plane ahead, making sure not to run up on him. In the clouds, you couldn’t see the plane you were following, so you held speed, rate of climb and heading, and hoped to God that everyone else did the same. When we were in the clear we made switchback turns to keep from running too far inland. There was no sense in adding to the length of the mission.

  In the assembly area, we moved close into one another, forming three-plane triangles across a staggered front nearly a thousand yards wide. The plane on the right wing was a thousand feet higher than the plane on the left wing. Colonel Mast, at the point of the far right triangle, looked down on his creation like God from heaven and gave the order that sent us climbing toward the wing assembly areas. We took another half-hour to get to twenty-four thousand feet, rendezvous with two other groups, and form up into a fifty-four-plane box. We had been in the air eighty minutes when we passed over the Belgian coast, climbing through twenty-five thousand feet. We had already burned 30 percent of our fuel.

  We followed the line of the French-Belgian border for almost an hour without any opposition. The Thunderbolts and the Marauders were raising enough hell down on the deck to keep the gunners and the fighter pilots occupied, and the only enemy up at our altitude was the cold. Air temperature outside the plane was twenty below. Inside, with the little bit of heat we could steal from the engines, we had temperatures ranging from ten below to ten above, depending on whether you were near one of the hot air outlets or near an open gun port. The moisture of your breath froze on the tip of your nose. Fingers and toes went numb. The oxygen hurt your lungs if you took a deep breath.

  Lubricating oil turned to gum, causing all sorts of mechanical problems. Machine guns jammed, so each gun fired a few rounds every ten minutes to keep the bolts from seizing. Flight controls became heavy. Moving the trim tabs was like churning butter.

  Outside the plane, the engines condensed moisture that the temperature flash froze into ice crystals, leaving bright, reflective trails behind each engine. All the Germans had to do was follow the contrails and they would be led right to us.

  The Mustangs joined us when we reached the German border at Saarbrucken and took up a position northeast of our box, between the Ruhr fighter bases and us. If the Germans came climbing up, they would have to get past our bodyguards. They were beginning to learn that the Mustangs could do just about anything faster and tighter than they could, and that if they were caught laboring to our altitude, they didn’t stand a chance.

  Antiaircraft guns began flashing on the ground below. Instantly, Mast ordered a ten-degree turn to the right. It took the shells better than a minute to reach our altitude, so by the time they exploded into flak bursts, we were somewhere else. Next Mast sent us down five hundred feet and made a left turn back to our original heading. Hardly were we back on course when he ordered a thousand-foot climb that also caused a hefty speed reduction. We kept oscillating around our intended course, exploiting the time delay between the gun firing and the shell-reaching altitude. Flak clouds formed all around our contrails, but none came near enough to cause us any problems. Karlsruhe passed beneath us. We had crossed the eastern extreme of France and were well into Germany. Our target, once so distant, was less than an hour ahead. We had been in the air over three hours, then without warning, we were under attack.

  Fighters that we first thought to be 109s were diving out of the sun to our right. They came in three pairs, flying across the front of our formation, matching our stacking angle so they could keep shooting right across our line. We never saw them until they were past us. A few of the planes at the left of the formation began firing, but could never lock on.

  Instantly, the Mustangs turned in and dove, spiraling onto the tails of the Germans, but the attackers pulled incredibly tight turns to shake our little guys and roared back across our formation with guns blazing. Our gunners returned fire, but the tracers couldn’t catch up. The Germans finished their run and climbed back into the sun.

  “What the hell were they?” Rusty called from his nose gun.

  “One nineties,” Firkins said.

  “Nah! Too big for 190s. They must have been Messerschmitts.”

  “They looked like 190s…”

  I switched to the fighter frequency and heard the same murmurs of disbelief.

  “Did you see that turn? He pulled way inside me.”

  “Fuck the turn. Did you see the way they climbed out of here?”

  “What were they?”

  “Some kind of super 190. I’ve got them on my wing cameras.”

  It was a grim moment for all of us. Our Mustangs had met their match.

  I switched back to our group frequency just in time to hear Morrie Sussman tell Colonel Mast that he was going down. Back to my right, at the top of the formation, one of our B-17s was trailing thick smoke. Sussman was turning it to the south, away from the squadron. He was still under control, despite the fire engulfing his right wing.

  “Get ’em out, Morrie,” Mast commanded.

  “Roger, Colonel. Will do.”

  “Now—while you can still hold her flat!”

  “We’re on our way…”

  Black dots trailed out behind the plane and started to fall. Firkins, in the top turret, was counting “One…two…three…I see three…no, four. Four of them are out.” The gunners, and maybe the radioman, had gotten out through the door.

  The plane was turning a 360, away from the formation and then all the way around until it was heading back in. The bomb-bay doors were open and two crewmen dropped out. Then the wing folded back and tore itself off. The bomber began spinning in increasingly tighter circles, breaking up under the forces the spin was creating. The tail assembly broke off and then the plane split in half. Smoldering debris dropped like the aftermath of a fireworks explosion.

  “How many?”

  “Six…maybe seven.”

  “Not ten?”

  “I didn’t see ten.”

  “I only counted four.”

  Then Mast broke in. “Quiet on the circuit! Keep your heads in the mission and your eyes on the sky. Maybe next time someone will see those fuckers before they’re on top of us.”

  More antiaircraft guns fired and we went back i
nto our course and altitude maneuvers. Clusters exploded around us, but they were still firing at where we would have been. We were more concerned with the fighters, until the random odds turned against us. As we wove back through our base course, we ran into the barrage that had been fired over a minute ago. Blind luck? Theory of numbers? Whatever. Suddenly the shells were exploding exactly where we were. Black puffs rocked the plane and the shrapnel hit us like hailstones. A plane lower down in the formation burst into a fireball and vanished. Another pitched wildly out of the formation, flipped over on its back and dove down through the clouds. Colonel Mast ordered a turn to the north, and a few seconds later we were out of the fire field. Nurnberg passed off the left wing. “Fifteen minutes to target,” the mission commander called over his frequency.

  Bob Meyers, the bombardier, crawled back to the catwalk and pulled the safety pins out of the bomb fuses. On the way back, he looked into the cockpit. “They’re all hot, Jim. Keep us nice and steady.”

  “Let’s not take any home with us,” Glenn Randlett joked.

  Meyers was still in the cockpit when I saw the black dots swarming just ahead of us.

  The entire Luftwaffe had come up to meet us. Fighter squadrons were stacked one above the other, from thirty thousand feet down to twenty-five thousand, dead ahead of us. They were lined up for one of their favored frontal attacks. Our escorts were rushing out to cut them off, one group heading right at them, the other climbing up and away to set up a diving turn.

  We had front-row seats for the frontal attack. The Mustangs and the Messerschmitts charged each other like knights at a joust. Guns flashed, creating a brief haze of smoke, then planes flashed into fire. A Messerschmitt vanished into a fireball. Another turned abruptly and broke into pieces. Then a Mustang began trailing smoke and spiraled out. Within seconds the sky ahead was sooty from burning oil and filled with the debris of exploded airplanes.