John Katzenbach: Hart’s War

And into this reverie he'd heard the captain drawl one last time, "Hang on tight, boys, we're gonna try for the water!" and Lovely Lydia started to dive down, reaching for the waves that were their only real chance, to dump themselves into the water and extinguish the fire before the plane exploded.

It seemed to him that the world around him was screaming not words from memory, not sounds that belonged to the earth, but the crackling noise of some hellish circle of tormenting flame. He had always told himself that if they went into the drink, he would jam himself up behind the reinforced steel sled of the copilot's seat, but he didn't have time to get there. Instead, he hung desperately onto a ceiling pipe, riding into the blue of the Mediterranean ocean at nearly three hundred miles per hour, and looking for all the world in that terrifying moment like some nonchalant Manhattan commuter hanging from a subway train strap patiently waiting for his stop.

In his bunk, he shivered again.

He remembered: The sergeant in the turret screaming.

Tommy had staggered a step toward the gunner because he'd known that the man was locked into his seat, and the safety catch wouldn't release because the impact must have jammed it shut, and he was crying for help. But in that second, he had heard the captain yell to him,

"Tommy, get out! Just get out!

I'll help the gunner!" There were no sounds from the others.

The captain's order was the last sound he'd heard from any of the crew of the Lovely Lydia. He'd been surprised that the side hatch had opened, and surprised again when his Mae West had actually worked, helping him to bob on the surface like a child's cork toy. He'd paddled away from the plane, then turned back, waiting for the others to exit, but none had.

He'd called out once: "Get out! Get out! Please get out!"

And then he'd floated, waiting.

After a few seconds. Lovely Lydia had abruptly pitched forward, nose down, and silently slid beneath the water's surface, leaving him alone in the ocean.

This had always disturbed him. The captain, the copilot, the bombardier, and both gunners, they had always seemed to him to be so much quicker and sharper than he was. They were all young and athletic, coordinated, and skilled. They were quick and efficient, good shots with a machine gun or a basketball, fast around the bases legging out an extra base rap, and he had always known they were the real warriors on the Lovely Lydia, while he'd always thought of himself as this silly bookworm student, a little thin, a little clumsy, but good with calculations and a slide rule, who had grown up staring at the stars in the sky above his Vermont home, and thus, more by accident than patriotic design, had become a navigator and was more or less along for the ride. He had thought of himself as merely a piece of equipment, an appendage on the flight, while they were the fliers and the killers and the real men of the battle.

He did not understand why he had lived and all the men who'd seemed so much stronger than he had died.

And so he'd floated alone on the sea for nearly twenty-four hours, salt water mingling with his tears, on the edge of delirium, swimming in despair, until an Italian fishing boat had plucked him from the waves.

They were rough men who'd handled him with surprising gentleness. The fishermen had wrapped him in a blanket and given him a glass of red wine. He could still remember how it burned his throat as he drank.

And when they came to shore, they had dutifully handed him over to the Germans.

That was what had really happened. But in his dream the truth always evaporated, replaced instead by a much happier reality, where they were all alive, and gathered beneath the wing of the Lovely Lydia, trading jokes about the Arab merchants outside their dusty North African base, and boasting about what they would do with their lives and their girlfriends and wives when they got back to the States. He had sometimes thought, when they were still alive, that the men on the Lovely Lydia were the best friends he would ever have, and then sometimes thought that they would never see each other again, once the war was over. It had never really occurred to him that he would never see them again because they were all dead, and he was still alive, because this had never really seemed a possibility.

In his bunk, he thought: They will be with me always.

One of the prisoners in another bed shifted, the wooden slats creaking and obscuring the man's words as he talked in his sleep, the noise dissolving into an almost girlish moaning sound.

I lived and they died.

He cursed often at his eyes, and how they'd betrayed them all by spotting that convoy. He thought incongruously that if only he'd been born stone blind, instead of blessed with especially acute eyesight, then they'd all still be alive. It did no good, he knew, to think like that. Instead, he vowed that if he survived the war, one day he would travel all the way across the country to West Texas, and after he arrived there, he would drive deep into the scrubland and arroyos of that harsh land and take up a rifle and begin to kill jackrabbits.

Every jackrabbit he could spot. Every jackrabbit for miles around.

He envisioned himself shooting dozens, hundreds, thousands, a great slaughter of rabbits. Killing jackrabbits until he fell to the earth exhausted, ammunition expended, the barrel of the rifle seared red hot.

Surrounded by enough dead jackrabbits to last his captain an eternity.

He knew he would not be able to fall back to sleep.

So, he lay back, listening to the rain striking the metal roof and resounding like gunshots. And mixed in that sound came a low and distant thud. And moments later, shrill whistles and frantic shouts, all in the unmistakable angry German of the prison camp guards. He swung his feet out of the bunk and was pulling on his boots when he heard a pounding on the barracks door and "Raus! Raus! Schnell!" It would be cold on the parade ground, and Tommy Hart reached for his old leather flight jacket. The men around him were hurrying to dress, pulling on their woolen underwear and cracked and worn flight boots as the first insinuations of dawn light came filtering through the grimy barracks windows. In his hurry to get dressed, he lost sight of the Lovely Lydia and its crew, letting them fade into the near part of his memory as he quickly joined the flow of men heading out into the damp early morning chill of Stalag Luft Thirteen.

Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart shuffled his feet in the light brown mud of the parade compound. The grumbling had started within a few minutes of the assembly-an Appell in German-and now, whenever a guard walked by, the men would begin to catcall, and complain.

The Germans, for the most part, ignored them. Occasionally a Hundfuhrer, with his snarling shepherd at his side, would turn at the groups of men, and make motions as if he were ready to let the dog loose, which had the intended effect of quieting the airmen, if only for a few minutes. Luftwaffe Oberst Edward Von Reiter, the camp commandant, had quick-marched past the formations hours earlier, pausing only when accosted by the Senior American Officer, Colonel Lewis MacNamara, who immediately launched into a series of rapid-fire complaints. Von Reiter listened to MacNamara for perhaps thirty seconds, then casually saluted, raising a riding crop to the brim of his cap, and gestured for the SAO to return to his position at the head of the blocks of men. Without another glance at the row of airmen, Von Reiter had disappeared in the direction of Hut 109.

The kriegies mumbled and stamped their feet, as the day grew around them. Kriegies was what they called themselves, a shortening of the German Kriegsgefangene, which loosely translated into "war captured."

Standing, waiting, was both boring and exhausting. It was something they were familiar with, but hated.