Evan Hunter - Sons

The bomber was losing altitude fast. Smoke was pouring from the waistgunner’s position aft of the radio compartment. The first flight of FW-190s had reformed and were diving on her nose now in an attempt to deliver the knockout blow, coming in one after the other in a straight single line, shooting at the cockpit and then peeling off just out of range of the nose guns. Ace was swearing into his radio. We had not seen the Luftwaffe on our last six missions, their habit being to hoard ships and gasoline for strikes they could be certain were coming, and now the sky was swarming with them. They were not concerned with us, we were only incidental. They were after the B-17. To each of those German pilots, the big brown bomber must have seemed the symbol of everything that was destroying the German dream, relentlessly pounding oil refinery and synthetic plant, aircraft factory and railway line. We had lost three B-17s to flak over the target, and now the German Air Force wanted to make it four, and they furiously attacked that poor descending bastard in successive determined waves as Ace and I tried desperately to break up their formations, buzzing in and out and around their superior force, going for the lead ship each time, diving in at the nose, pressing the machine-gun button on the rear of the wheel the instant an enemy spinner appeared in the illuminated ring sight, trying to rake the cowling and the cockpit, and then pulling back on the stick and climbing for another dive as another flight zoomed in on the bomber.

It was hopeless.

My hands and feet were freezing, I found it difficult to breathe. My eyes, my head kept jerking around to every minute of the sky-clock (“Keep your head moving!” Lieutenant Di Angelo had shouted in Basic Flying at Gunter Field) and the headache was upon me full-blown, beating in my temples and at the base of my skull. Together, Ace and I managed to knock down two Focke-Wulfs, but the bomber was losing altitude steadily, dropping closer and closer to the ground, and there was almost nothing we could do to save her. The German fighters followed her down as we kept trying to drive them off, persistently closing in on her, and finally scoring direct hits on the navigator’s compartment and the cockpit. The big lumbering crippled airplane went into a slow flaming spin toward the ground, and the German pilots broke off contact at last, streaking for home, one of them having the audacity to waggle his wings at us when he left. We got out fast before the flak started again, and picked up the rest of the flight some fifty miles beyond the rally point. We did not see any other enemy fighters on the way home, but we ran into heavy flak over Hungary, losing two more bombers to a rocket battery, and picking up another straggler with her number one engine gone. At Trieste, which we could see clearly below us from 20,000 feet, I dropped down on her left wing and lifted my hand in the three-ring sign, letting the pilot know I was leaving him there, and he threw the sign back, and I veered away with Ace on my left, and called into my microphone, “Big Fence, this is Springcap Seven-Nine. Request a fix, over.”

“Big Fence reading Springcap Seven-Nine. Give me a long count, over.”

“Springcap calling Big Fence. Commencing long count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Over.”

“Springcap Seven-Nine, your position forty-five thirty-nine north, fourteen four east, approximately five miles cast of Trieste. Take heading one-six-six, you are approximately two hundred and sixty miles from base.”

We made it home in fifty minutes. As soon as I landed, I slid off the wing, opened my pants, and fired seven hours’ worth of piss at the runway while Sergeant Balson looked the other way and tried to pretend I wasn’t sending up a steaming stinking cloud to envelop his precious airplane.

We could not stop thinking about the bomber we had lost.

The pilot had been a guy named George Heffernan, a soft-spoken law student from Minnesota. We had often ribbed him about his gentle manner, telling him he would never win a court battle because he was not an aggressive type, this in spite of the fact that he had flown the lead bomber in a massive flight of five hundred bombers against the crude oil refinery at Floridsdorf on the fifth of November, and again on the eighteenth. Now, in December, a week before Christmas, flying for the first time after a long spell of bad weather, he had been shot down over Poland, and we had watched the spinning flaming airplane he and his crew had named Mother’s Milk explode on contact with the ground while the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs hovered.

We had also been informed by Archie Colombo in our tent (we still referred to it as a tent, even though the mason had finally finished our tufa-block house and we were living in unprecedented luxury that included a tank and heater built for us by one of the T-3s and fueled with 100-octane aviation gasoline) that a recent strike against Odertal had brought up two ME-262s, the dreaded twin-engine German jet. It was his opinion, an opinion shared by many of us in the Air Force, that if the Germans could produce enough of those airplanes, we would lose our air superiority and stand a good chance of losing the war as well. I had never seen the jet, but other pilots had related tales of it rising suddenly and frighteningly to attack at speeds better than five hundred miles an hour. Firing four cannons from its fuselage nose, the ME-262 could outclimb, outmaneuver, and outshoot any piston-driven airplane we possessed. Ace and I were not happy about Archie’s wide-eyed report, and we were even less happy about having seen Georgie Heffernan go down in flames over Poland. And since we were miserable, and tired, and perhaps a little scared, we drank a lot that night.

There was no shortage of scotch just then because the squadron had learned of a cache of Haig & Haig in Cairo, and had chinned in a small fortune to buy a full case in anticipation of our Christmas celebration. Tommy Rod win had been elected to fly the secret mission. In Cairo, they had tried to tuck the contraband into the gondola around him, but the cramped cockpit would not accommodate all twelve bottles. So Tommy had been forced to cache three of them in the left engine nacelle, and they got so damn hot on the return flight that they shattered. He had landed in Foggia in a heavy fog, the nacelle stinking of booze, and had almost been lynched by the rest of us because of the breakage. But there was still plenty of scotch around, and Ace tucked a full fifth into the waistband of his trousers before we grabbed a jeep and headed for Francesca’s place.

I don’t know how we got there alive; I don’t even remember who was doing the driving. It must have been a little past midnight when we drove into the courtyard and almost knocked over the fence penning in Gino’s single pig — a relative, we suspected. We reeled over to the darkened farmhouse and Ace threw open the door and yelled, “Frankie, where the fuck are you?” and then said, “Will, you see anybody?” and I said, “No, it’s dark in here,” and he said, “Of course, it’s dark in here, there’s no light in here,” and I yelled, “Frankie!” and Francesca came out of the bedroom pulling a woolen robe around her.

“It’s late,” she said.

“It’s fucking early,” Ace said.

“You flew,” Francesca said. It was not a question.

“Yes, we fucking flew,” Ace answered. We were still standing in the dark, the door closed behind us, the only illumination coming from the moon that glanced through the window at the far end of the room. “Put on some lights,” he said. “Isn’t there any electricity in this dump?”

“You know there is no electricity,” Francesca replied.