Evan Hunter - Sons

“Anything else, Ballsy?”

“That’s it, sir, have a good flight.”

“Thank you. See you later.”

“Right, sir.”

I went up the ladder onto the wing. The P-38 was not a small airplane. It weighed 17,500 pounds combat-loaded and 14, 100 pounds when the cannon and machine guns were taken out of the nose for an unarmed weather recon flight. Either way, it was a huge hunk of machinery for one man to take into the air, and I always climbed into that cockpit with a sense of apprehension, knowing that my full concentration would be demanded for the next several hours, and knowing that I would come back to the field with a pounding headache. The P-38 cruised at close to 270 miles an hour, as fast as the Mustang or the Thunderbolt, except at high altitudes, and even though I rarely experienced a sense of speed in the air (all of us were weaving over the bombers at the same speed, throttles set), I nonetheless recognized that I was hurtling through the sky at very high velocity, especially when we passed a stationary cloud mass and the point was suddenly and forcefully driven home, and I knew that the only things keeping me aloft were those twin 1600 horsepower Allisons and my own intelligence. So I constantly listened to every sound, reacted to every vibration, every alien ping, knowing instantly if an engine was missing or an instrument was off, preparing to deal with any malfunction that threatened to drop me to the ground — and that alone could give a man a goddamn headache, even if he didn’t have the Luftwaffe and the flak to worry about.

On the ground, though, the airplane was nothing less than beautiful. Looking at her head-on, you saw three huge, thrusting silver bullets, the forwardmost one being the canopied cockpit with its lethal nose, on either side of which were the engine nacelles with their three-bladed airscrews. From wing tip to wing tip, the ship measured fifty-two feet, which meant that once inside the cockpit, you were looking out past the flanking engines onto twenty-six feet of metal on either side of you. It was nice to have two engines in case one decided to quit or was helped to quit by the GAF; it was also nice to have that 23-mm Madsen cannon in the nose surrounded by four 50-caliber machine guns, which was, to be modest, exceptionally heavy armament. The engine booms tapered like torpedos back to the twin fin-and-rudder tail assembly, with the main undercarriage wheels jutting from the twin booms, just back of the wings. Those wings were six feet off the ground when the plane was sitting on the flight line. The over-all impression was one of enormous size and power. Tyler’s Luck, the legend read — Amen.

If there was anything that characterized the flight-line wait before take-off, it was our absolute silence. There was no radio chatter between the pilots, no need even for the formality of tower clearance. At precisely 0845, the leader of White Flight thundered down the runway and took off, followed by his wingman seconds later, and then by the element leader and his wingman. I was the element leader of Red Flight. With Ace Gibson on my wing, I taxied onto the wire mesh landing mat, following the two planes ahead, and did a final run-up check, propeller switches in AUTOMATIC, governors in full-forward take-off position, magnetos at 2300 rpm, toes holding hard on the hydraulic brakes. I pulled the left governor back until I got a reduction of 200 rpm, and then returned it to the full-forward take-off position, making sure I got 2300 rpm again. Then I checked out the electrical system — voltmeter approximately twenty-eight volts, ammeter charging below fifty amps. I was ready. As White Flight circled the field overhead, waiting to be joined by the rest of the squadron, I thought This is number nineteen, thirty-one missions to go, and then Archie Colombo, leading Red Flight, poured on the juice.

At 0848, I was airborne.

The people of Foggia did not like P-38 pilots. This made it difficult to form any alliances with girls, and so we were extremely lucky to get Francesca. The reason they did not like P-38 pilots was that the Air Force had repeatedly bombed the railway marshaling yards when the town was still held by the enemy, and the villagers had repeatedly repaired the damage done in the raids until finally the Air Force dropped leaflets telling them to stop fixing the yards or the town itself would be bombed. The Italians went right ahead with their reconstruction work after the next raid, so the Air Force naturally sent in its P-38s to bomb and strafe Foggia. Whereas we were in no way connected with those long-ago pilots who had done the dirty deed, the moment a girl from Foggia found out you flew a P-38, you were dead. It didn’t pay to lie, either, because they knew more about the Air Force than the Air Force did itself, and they could tell (by which field you were stationed at in the Foggia complex) whether you flew a bomber or a fighter. Moreover, the 94th Fighter Squadron was one of the few Air Force units permitted to wear an additional piece of jewelry above the silver pilot’s wings: our identifying squadron insignia, a top hat in a ring. Fifty-cent pieces were very difficult to come by on the base, because enterprising machinists were turning them into this insignia jewelry, which was then traded to pilots for anything from two or three fresh eggs to a half-dozen cigars. But if you wore the insignia over your wings, it immediately identified you as one of those hated P-38 pilots who had shot up the town, and instantly brought pride in one’s squadron into direct conflict with one’s natural desire to get laid.

Francesca either hadn’t heard about those fearsome P-38 pilots of yore or simply did not give a damn. We had met her on the road one day while we were trying to hitch a ride into town, all the jeeps having disappeared by the time Ace and I got out of debriefing. Our flight leader and his wingman had been shot down in a raid over Odertal, and Ace and I, presumably having witnessed every enemy pass, had been detained to answer Major Dimple’s interminable questions, Were they in flames, Did they hit the deck, Did you see silk? and so on. Francesca was not exactly what one would have called a beauty, but she was a girl, and she was there. She came down the road on a bicycle, rare for these parts, since the Germans had taken with them almost anything that had wheels, wearing open sandals, one of those flowered housedresses with buttons down the front, and a threadbare black cardigan sweater fastened only at the throat and flapping loose around her shoulders like a short cape. She was a chunky girl with curly black hair and brown eyes, a lot of hair under the armpits, some on the legs, but then again, even the higher-type broads in Rome hadn’t learned to shave like American women. Ace hailed her and asked her in English if she would give us a ride to town, and she smiled in a shy, frightened manner and shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she did not speak English, which we later learned was an absolute falsehood. She spoke English as well as any other Italian in Foggia, in fact better; she had been shacking up for some three months with a bomber pilot who caught very heavy shit over Budapest and had never been heard from since. She also told us later that she was afraid of us that first day on the road because she thought we might rape her, and had pretended not to speak English so that she could listen to and understand everything we were saying and therefore be forewarned if we decided to jump her. If we had any designs at the moment, however, they were on her bicycle and not her hot little body. We kept waving our hands around and trying to explain to her that we wanted a ride into town, and finally Ace demonstrated a method whereby the three of us could share the bike, he sitting on the seat and pedaling, she sitting sidesaddle on the crossbar, and me straddling the rack over the rear wheel, legs sticking out almost parallel to the ground, a system that worked for a distance of perhaps six feet before we all fell into the ditch at the side of the road, Francesca displaying a great deal of inviting white thigh as her dress went up over her tumbling legs. I think it was then that we decided she might not be so bad to fuck.