Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

When I’d finished I sealed the envelope and placed it in my footlocker, where over the days to come, as this letter writing would become something of a habit, I would accrue quite a collection of undeliverables.

7.

Saturday night we were briefed again, this time by Wing Commander Pennington himself. We arrived at the airfield at 2100 hours. At 2315 we took off. Clear skies, a rarefied night absent moon or cloud. Three hundred miles from the English coast we joined our wing in formation over the North Sea. We were in rear right. This was the most dreaded position, most exposed to flanking attacks. Still I was grateful to have to worry only about the bomber to my left. Maintaining formation could be the difference between living and dying.

As I moved in, Navigator Smith came on the interphone.

“Press on regardless, Captain West.” I said certainly, but suggested that perhaps we should keep quiet, as we had for our former captain, Flight Officer Ford. This didn’t keep Smith from bugging Gallsworthy and McSorely about the WAAFs he was sure they’d been with the night before. He ran on until we reached the German border. Contrails of Stirlings strung out thousands of feet below. At that height I was reminded of Goethe’s description of blindness: “Everything near becomes distant.” Though I knew intellectually those fighters were a thousand, two thousand feet away, that distance might have been all distances, or none, in the enormous Prussian sky.

Our rendezvous point, position A, was less than an hour from Hamburg. Now Gallsworthy was to begin dropping his mysterious packages. Over the interphone the only sound was of his timing the drops: “One Lancaster, two Lancaster, three Lancaster,” all the way to sixty, then another drop. Frigid air filled the cockpit each time he opened the window. When he reset his count we looked behind to where thousands of silver swimming minnows filled dark air, reflecting the lights of bombers. Yellow flares marked the path before us. As we approached the Kiel Canal the previously cloudless sky filled with brown clouds of flak smoke.

Gallsworthy called out that he’d seen a Lancaster far off to our starboard. All seven men of its crew bailed out.

Then we were through it without incident.

Another half hour and Navigator Smith came over the interphone: We had achieved our final turning point at Kellinghausen. What we saw before us then made procedure unnecessary.

Hamburg was already glowing, an earthbound star. Lancaster squadrons all across the midnight horizon were lit by individual auras against the dark summer sky. By the time we made our approach, no green or yellow flare was discernible. They’d mixed together with the blockbusters each squadron had already dropped, four-thousand-pound bombs and four-pound incendiaries landing again and again as our bombers dropped their loads, blooming like enormous sunflowers thousands of feet down.

Gallsworthy came on the interphone: What was there to drop on? Bombs atop bombs? I thought of my mother. I thought of my father, and of Françoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, “Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb.”

Navigator Smith came after: “Press on,” he said.

I felt the lightening of our plane as our bombload went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke.

I banked left.

Already we were on our return path. We encountered not a single Luftwaffe fighter. Those silvery minnows Gallsworthy had dropped had fooled German radar into thinking there were thousands of bombers all across the vector on which the minnows flew. Bombers before and after us had dropped the packages, too, and the Luftwaffe fighters hadn’t had enough fuel to stay skyward long enough to engage us. We’d approached Hamburg on the driest night of the summer and hardly faced any resistance.

Hamburg was given over to flame.

With the city burning behind us the night was no longer dark. Western suburbs of Hamburg burned phosphorescent, glowing out to their fuzzy lighted edges. There, glinting amid the dark earth below us on the path back to base, was the Elbe. The river flowed northward from below my father’s tannery, through Hamburg and on to the North Sea on the other side of which I was now stationed. For the first time since arriving at RAF Grimsby I caught a whiff of days swimming with Johana and Niny, gnats buzzing in the low Bohemian evening. Below us the shrapnel of a bomb found its way into the Elbe, floating upstream and out to the North Sea. River water carrying it had flowed from Leitmeritz and from Schalholstice, where it cooled in vats of tanning leather at my father’s business. Through Poland. Through the city I had just set ablaze during the dimming July night.

Hamburg’s flames lit our backs for miles, dimming in our wake until the ruined city ebbed to a match tip on the far horizon.

Soon we were clear of Hamburg. And in those moments after I’d exacted revenge on German soil, a face arose in mind so lucidly I couldn’t imagine shaking it, perhaps ever — a face I’d hoped to forget since I left her but which clearly I couldn’t shake: Françoise’s.

8.

Debriefing back at base at almost 0500 hours was joyous. The first moment of true happiness I’d felt since discovering I would be accepted into flight training. It allowed for a true forgetfulness of all else: This bombing was our whole world in the moments after we returned. Morale soared after our unqualified success. Navigator Smith recounted perfect turns his pilot — the Eastern European Jew now called Poxl West — had executed at each turning point. A low black course of stubble had cropped up on his jutting chin, and the deep furrow of his dark Etonian brow brought a feckless look to his flat face. McSorely described the night sky and the Catherine wheels raised by each blockbuster bomb as it landed on central Hamburg, one after the next, stoking flames so high we couldn’t see the city itself.

Even taciturn Flight Engineer Smith disregarded unspoken protocol and told the WAAFs who questioned us about our perfect run. There was such good cheer in the Nissen hut, I wondered if rest, would come that night for the crew of the S-Sugar. But we all fell immediately to sleep and then, late that morning, I was awakened by Navigator Smith’s cries. They were half-human, a macaw’s squawk, which stirred no man among us but me, all the rest wholly overtaken by exhaustion. I dropped from my bed. I held his thrashing arms. He woke only long enough to dart upright. He looked me in the eyes. He steeled his body. He had long, sinewy arms and a thicket of dark dark hair along them to match his brown brow. I could feel the sisal sharpness of his arm hair in my palms as he thrashed. Sweat covered his face and his eyes flashed.

Then he grew still. He recognized me and returned to himself.

“Wizard flying, young Yid,” he said. “Now let me sleep.”

The evening following our run, there was revelry. We went to the Rooster’s Peck, where Gallsworthy and I played a game of darts. Our crew congratulated me on a perfectly executed run. Any reservations I’d had before dissolved in the warmth of drink. Even McSorely stood me a pint, and from behind his acne-covered face — he was only nineteen, after all, and looked like a schoolboy — I could see a softening of his features. After darts Gallsworthy returned to our table, where he hoisted a warm Harp and said, “To our pilot, Poxl West — a hebe who does some fine flying!” Laughter erupted among the men of S-Sugar. Reconnaissance reported severe damage to the Hamburg Krupps factory. We’d hit our targets. We’d done in Hamburg.

On our meander back to our hut, Gallsworthy held me back until we were a good thousand feet behind the rest of S-Squadron.

“Poxl,” he said. “Poxl, I know you know all about women.” He was slurring his words, and while I should have been thinking of Glynnis, I was thinking about Françoise. “You had Glynnis back in London and you have your cousins. But me…” His weight shifted all the way to his right foot, then to his left, almost tipping him each time. “Me, I’ve never even kissed a girl, if you can believe it.” Gallsworthy was a squat five feet tall, maybe a few inches more, and, even despite his training, nearly two hundred pounds.