Evan Hunter - Sons

“Take-off time is 0845,” the major said. “Your route is as follows: base to forty-four ten north, twenty twenty cast to Kragujevac to Paracin to forty-three fifty-two north, twenty-one twenty-four cast to last landfall at Albanian-Yugoslav coastal border to base. ETA at rendezvous is 1000 hours, altitude 21,500 to 22,000 feet. Radio silence, of course, until you’re over the target,” he said, which was the cue, as it was at every briefing, for the group’s meteorologist to step up with the day’s weather report. Captain Rutherford was a moon-faced little man with a pencil-line mustache and a high reedy voice. He invariably read the weather report like a radio announcer doing a thirty-second spot following the news, as if totally unaware that one or another of us had earlier flown a recon mission over the target to gather the information, the enemy being extremely chary about letting us know when it was okay to bomb. If the skies were dear, Rutherford sounded as though he were reporting the good news to thousands of housewives anxious to go out shopping, rather than to a collection of sleepy-eyed pilots who were dragging ass and hoping for fog over the target. When he said, as he did now, “Stratus at 2000 feet over Dubrovnik and the offshore islands,” we ladies of Lake Shore Drive knew he really meant it was raining lightly there, “clearing rapidly inland approximately midway to target, cirro-cumulus at 24,000 to 26,000 over the Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo area, ceiling and visibility unlimited.” He smiled, pleased with his delivery; in a mimeographed Intops Summary, the weather would probably be reported later as simply CAVU. Rutherford nodded in dismissal, took a seat behind the table, and did not look up when Captain Schulz (who we all insisted was a Nazi spy, even though he was our own Intelligence Officer) came forward to give us our flak and enemy aircraft information. This was the part we always listened to very closely. With the back of his hand, Schulz brushed a hank of straight blond hair off his forehead, blinked at the assembled pilots, consulted a scrap of brown paper so tiny that we were certain he would swallow it as soon as he had read us the information on it, and then matter-of-fact said, “Flak reported on mission route week of September 10 as follows: Stolak and Bileca, light to medium; Pljevlja, heavy; Priboj, intermittent light; extremely heavy over target area and in Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo triangle. Suggest alternate headings to avoid Pljevlja batteries. Very little E/A activity this past week, though eight Me 109s were sighted ten miles southeast of Sarajevo, at five thousand feet, no markings. Eighth Air Force has reported sighting jets again, but the possibility of any in Yugoslavia is extremely slight; whatever comes at you from Belgrade/Zemun or possibly Novi Sad will be conventional aircraft. You’ll probably have a lot of stragglers coming off the target, plenty to keep you busy on the way home. If you’re shot down...” (We all stopped listening here, because this was the part we heard at each and every briefing, reiterated for all of us idiot pilots who were only flying an airplane that cost a quarter of a million dollars and who had been trained at an expense of another couple of hundred thousand dollars, but who were too dumb to know what we were supposed to do if we got shot down, unless it was repeated seven days a week) “... properly and with respect if you’re picked up by the Luftwaffe, hostilely if the ground forces get you, and extremely badly if the Gestapo does. Check your sidearm before take-off, make sure you’ve got your packet of money, your first-aid kit” (ho-hum) “your emergency rations, and your knife. If you’re forced down, you’re under orders to destroy the airplane. If you bail out, get rid of your parachute.” Schulz looked at his little brown piece of paper again, and then sat down. Major Dimple came forward.

“All right,” he said, “here are your plane assignments,” and began reading off the names of the pilots and the numbers of the planes they would be flying into Yugoslavia. Our group was always briefed together, which meant that there were forty-eight pilots assembled in the church that morning. The 94th Squadron had twenty-five pilots in it, but no more than sixteen of us went up on any mission, four flights — White, Red, Blue, and Yellow — with four P-38s in each flight. Today, only fourteen of us were going, in flights of four, four, three, and three. Not every pilot had the same plane assigned to him for every strike, but Ace and I were lucky in that respect, flying the identical plane each time, a privilege usually reserved only for senior pilots. (We naturally considered those airplanes our own, and were terribly annoyed when they were assigned to other pilots for a mission we were not flying.) On both nacelles of Ace’s airplane, he had painted four spread playing cards, all aces, and the name Aces High stenciled in a semicircle above them. My plane was called Tyler’s Luck, a bastardization of the comic strip Tim Tylers Luck, and the design on my engines featured blond Tim and black-haired Spud, both grinning. Anyway, since Ace and I knew which planes we’d be flying, we stopped listening again, until the major said, “Check your timepieces,” and then hesitated, watching the sweep-hand, and then said, “It’s oh-eight-seventeen, good luck, gentlemen,” which we never felt he really meant.

Captain Kepler, who had been assigned squadron leader for this mission, gave us a brief talk outside the church, telling us what altitude he wanted to fly at to rendezvous, and setting our courses and speeds. He told us again that he didn’t want any noise until we were over the target, and then he looked at his watch, said, “Okay, guys,” and walked off to get a second cup of coffee in the mess hall. Ace and I went to the latrine because this would be our last opportunity to do so (we rarely used the pilot’s relief tube) until sometime this afternoon. Then he went for his good luck cup of coffee, and I went back to the tent to dress.

The weather was still mild on the ground, but it would be something like eighty degrees below zero outside the airplane at 30,000 feet, and even though the P-38 was equipped with a heating tube, the temperature in the cockpit rarely rose to above fifty-five degrees. The Air Force also had a heated flying suit complete with an electric plug that fit into a cockpit jack, but the suit shrank when you washed it, and as a result only the smallest guys in the squadron flew in anything like heated comfort. So I always wore long johns, over which I pulled on a pair of khaki pants and shirt, and then coveralls, and then my leather fleece-lined jacket. I never wore the leather helmet because it got too uncomfortable on a long flight, preferring the poplin instead. I took very good care of my hands and my feet because those were the parts of the body that really began to ache after a while (those and the coccyx; you were sitting on the valve of a Mae West throughout the entire mission). I had bought a pair of fleece-lined boots from a British officer for twenty bucks, and those were what I wore on each raid, together with a pair of woolen, flannel-lined, sweater-cuffed GI gloves. Still, my hands and feet were always cold.

Sergeant Balson was standing alongside the plane when I came up to the flight line at about eight-thirty. He had already started her, and he stood listening to the engines now, bald head cocked to one side, the way my mother used to listen, though the crew chief was not the slightest bit deaf. Hands on hips, wearing coveralls and a wool cap, he kept listening to the engines as I approached, and then, without a word of greeting, said, “She seems to be warming up slowly, sir, missing a few times, but she’s sound, don’t worry. The left engine throttle lever is loose. And the trim-tab on the right is pulling a little hard.”