John Katzenbach: Hart’s War

He'd hesitated, just an instant, making swift calculations in his head.

They'd been flying for more than four hours and were at the end of their designated sweep. The crew was tired, eager to return to their base. The two destroyers were formidable defenses, even for the three bombers flying wing to wing in the midday sun. He had told himself at that moment:

Just turn away and say nothing, and the line of ships will be out of sight in seconds and no one will know.

But instead, he did as he'd been taught. He had listened to his own voice as if it were somehow unfamiliar.

"Captain, targets off the starboard wing. Distance maybe five miles."

Again, there'd been a small silence, before he'd heard the reply:

"Well, I'll be a damn horned frog. Tommy, ain't you the peach. You remind me to take you back with me to West Texas and we'll go hunting.

You got some pair of eyes, Tommy. Eyes sharp like yours, boy, ain't no jackrabbit for miles gonna get away from us. We'll have ourselves some fine fresh jackrabbit stew. Ain't nothin' in this world taste any better, boys…"

Whatever else the captain had said. Tommy Hart had lost in the shuffle, as he quickly crawled back through the narrow tunnel toward the midships, making way for the bombardier to assume his position in the nose. He was aware that the Lovely Lydia was making a slow bank to the right, and knew that their movement was being mimicked by The Randy Duck on their left and Green Eyes off their starboard wing. He returned to the small steel chair he occupied just behind the pilot and copilot and looked down at his charts again. He had thought: This is the worst moment. He wished he had the bombardier's duty, but they were the flight leaders, and that had given them an extra crewman for the sortie. By standing up, he could peer out between the two men flying the plane, but he knew he would wait until the last few seconds before doing that. Some fliers liked to see the target come up. He'd always thought of it as staring at death.

"Bombardier? You ready?" The captain's voice had increased in pitch, but still seemed unhurried.

"Ain't gonna take but one little of' bite at these boys, so let's make it worth our whiles to be here." He laughed, which echoed over the intercom.

The captain was a popular man, the sort of person who could find some dry, tumbleweed humor in even the direst of situations; who defeated almost all their obvious fears with the steady Texas drawl that never seemed ruffled, or even mildly irritated, even when flak was exploding around the plane and small pieces of deadly red-hot metal were ringing against the Mitchell's steel frame like the insistent knocking of some boorish and angry neighbor. The less obvious fears, Tommy knew, could never be completely destroyed.

Tommy Hart closed his eyes to the night, trying to squeeze away memory.

This didn't work. It never worked.

He heard the captain's voice again: "All right, boys, here we go. What is it our friends the limeys say?

"Tally ho!" Now, anyone here got any idea what the hell they mean by that?"

The twin fourteen-cylinder Wright Cyclone engines started screaming as the captain pushed them far past their redline. The maximum speed of the Mitchell was supposed to be two hundred and eighty-four miles per hour, but Tommy Hart knew they had pressed past that point. They were coming in out of the sun as best they could, low against the horizon, and he thought showing up nice and dark in the sights of every gun in the convoy.

Lovely Lydia shuddered slightly as the bomb bay doors opened, and then again, buffeted in the sky by the sudden wind of fire, as the guns awaiting them opened up. Black puffs filled the air, and the motors screamed in defiance. The copilot was shouting something incomprehensible as the plane ripped through the air toward the line of ships. Tommy had risen from his seat, finally staring through the cockpit window, his hands gripping a steel support bar. For the smallest of moments, he caught sight of the first of the German destroyers, its wake streaming out in a white tail behind it, as it spun about in the water, almost like a ballet dancer's pirouette, smoke from all its weapons rising into the air.

Lovely Lydia was slammed once, then again, skewing through the sky.

Tommy Hart had felt his throat dry up, and some sound was welling up from deep within himself, half a shout, half a groan, as he stared out ahead at the line of ships desperately trying to maneuver out of the path of the bombing run.

"Let 'em go!" he'd shouted, but his voice had been lost in the scream of the engines and the thudding of the flak bursting all around them.

The plane carried six five-hundred-pound bombs, and the technique used in skip-bombing a convoy was not unlike shooting a twenty-two at a line of metal ducks in a state fair sideshow, except the ducks couldn't fire back. The bombardier would ignore the Norden bombsight, which didn't really work all that well anyway, and line up each target by eye, release a bomb, then twitch the plane and line up the next. It was fast and frightening, speed and terror all mixed together.

When done properly, the bombs would rebound off the surface of the water and careen into the target like a bowling ball bounced down an alleyway toward the pins. The bombardier was only twenty-two, fresh-faced, and from a farm in Pennsylvania, but he had grown up shooting deer in the thick woods of the countryside of his home state, and he was very good at what he did, very cool, very composed, unaware that every microsecond took them closer to their own deaths, just as it took them closer to the deaths they were trying to achieve.

"One away!" the voice from the nose of the plane crackled over the intercom, distant, as if shouted from some field far away.

"Two gone! Three!" Lovely Lydia was shuddering bow to stern, torn by the force of the bullets flying toward her, the release of the bombs and the speed of its own wind ripping at her wings.

"All away! Get us out of here, captain!"

The engines surged again, as the captain pulled back on the stick, lining the bomber into the air.

"Rear turret! What y'all see?"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, captain! One hit! No three! No, damn it, five hits! Jesus Christ! Omigod, Omigod! They got the Duck! Oh, no.

Green Eyes, too!"

"Hang on, boys," the captain had said.

"We'll be home for dinner. Tommy, check it out! Tell me what y'all see back there!"

Lovely Lydia had a small Plexiglas bubble in the roof, designed for the navigator to use for observation, although Tommy preferred to climb into the nose. There was a small metal step that he used to push himself up into the bubble, and he took a quick glance behind them and saw huge black spirals of smoke rising from a half-dozen ships in the convoy and a massive red explosion from an oil tanker. But his attention to the success of their work was short-lived, for what he'd immediately seen had frightened him far more in that moment than anything in the bombing run-not the speed, not the scream of the engines, not the wall of bullets they'd passed through. What he saw was the unmistakable red-orange of flames shooting from the port engine, licking across the surface of the wing.

He had screamed into the intercom: "Port side! Port side!

Fire!"

Only to hear the captain reply nonchalantly, "I know, they're on fire, helluva job, bombardier…"

"No, damn it, captain, it's us!"

The flames were shooting out of the cowling, streaking the blue air, and black smoke was smudging the wind. We're dead. Tommy had thought right then. In a second or two, or maybe five or ten, the flames will hit the fuel line and race back into the wing tank and we'll explode.

He had stopped being afraid at that moment. It was the rarest of sensations, to look out at something taking place just beyond his reach and recognize it for what it was-his own death. He felt a slight twinge of irritation, as if frustrated that there was nothing he could do, but resigned. And, in the same second, felt an odd, distant sort of loneliness and worried about his mother, and his brother, who was somewhere in the Pacific, and his sister and his sister's best friend, who lived down the block from them back in Manchester and whom he loved with a painful, dogged intensity, and how they would all be hurt far worse and for far longer than he was about to be, because he knew the explosion that was about to overtake them would be quick and decisive.