A Memory Between Us (20 page)

“You haven’t opened it yet? Goodness, what are you waiting for?”

Then she knew. She’d been waiting for May, for support and assurance. She slid a shaky finger under the lip of the envelope, tore it open, and pulled out three sheets of paper. The first was an order to report to duty at Bowman Field for an eight-week program starting November 28, the second was a list of items to bring, and the third contained instructions to obtain travel vouchers.

Joy illuminated May’s face, and she threw her arms around Ruth. “You got in! You got in! Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Ruth hugged her friend, but her face crumpled.

“I’ll miss you so much. I’m sorry. I know it’s selfish. I know how much you want to go, but I will miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too.” Selfish—yes, that also described Ruth’s thoughts. She had a duty to her family. They needed Ruth far more than Ruth needed friends.

23

Thursday, October 14, 1943

Jack made a ninety-degree turn at the Initial Point over Würzburg and guided his high squadron northeast toward the target.

Schweinfurt.

No matter what he’d said, Jack hadn’t been able to bolster morale that morning. On August 17, half of the Eighth Air Force had been pummeled over Regensburg, and the other half over Schweinfurt. The veterans remembered; the rookies had heard.

Now both First and Third Divisions, with 320 Flying Fortresses, were out to bomb the ball bearing plants. Fighters made sporadic attacks when they crossed Luxembourg, and Third Division had lost a couple of Forts from the 96th in the lead.

Jack activated the AFCE. “She’s all yours, Char—” The sickness returned and twined around his gut. “Vickers, all yours.”

“Bombardier to pilot. Roger.”

Don Vickers was good, but he wasn’t Charlie de Groot. Three years flying together, and Charlie broke it up over a stupid difference in perspective. Charlie called it pride; Jack called it confidence. Charlie said Jack didn’t trust God; Jack knew he trusted in his God-given abilities. And what was the problem with the coffee? Jack hated standing in line; Charlie never minded. They always did it that way. Always. Now he had a problem with it?

Jack flexed his gloved fingers to keep them limber although it was minus forty degrees outside. Gray smoke rose from the bombs of First Division, six minutes ahead of them. Would the smoke obscure the target? Charlie knew how to aim in the smoke, but today on his last mission, he shirked his responsibility and flew deputy lead in Silverberg’s plane.

Charlie had broken up the foursome as well, which cut Jack’s time with Ruth in half, but he wouldn’t give up tomorrow night’s dance at the air base. With Ruth leaving for Kentucky in a few weeks, he wouldn’t waste the opportunity to hold her again. He’d been magnanimous and encouraged her goal although it ran contrary to his goal. Now he didn’t have much time. He wanted a long-distance romance, not a long-distance friendship.

A barrage of flak opened about a half mile ahead, like burnt popcorn scattered over the sky. In the lead, the 96th wobbled under the impact.

“Coming up on the target.” Vickers’s voice seemed high and foreign to Jack’s ear. “Bomb bay doors opening.” A metallic cranking sounded to the rear.

“Check. Bomb bay doors open,” Paul Klaus said from down in the ball turret.

More flak and closer. Behind Jack in the top turret, Harv Owens let out his own profane barrage. “Stay away, Jerry. I’m on mission twenty-five and I’m not going down.”

“Shut up, Owens. It’s bad luck,” Klaus said.

Jack pushed the interphone button on the control wheel. “That’s enough, boys. No luck, no superstition, and no chatter. Watch for fighters.”

He wished this superstition didn’t hold truth, but it did. A man stood the highest risk on the first five missions, and the last one. Other than Levitski and Vickers, all his crewmen were on number twenty-five, and of all targets, they got stuck with Schweinfurt, over four hours in enemy territory, most of it without P-47 Thunderbolt escort.

The steel bombs of the 96th dropped through black puffs of flak. Twenty-five thousand feet below, smoke roiled over the VKF ball bearing works. If the Eighth Air Force did their job today, Hitler would lose 50 percent of his ball bearing production for months, which would slow manufacture of all sorts of equipment, including fighter planes.

Jack leaned forward to get a better view. On the ground, explosions flashed bright like firecrackers, and then lumps of earth and smoke added to the mess.

The lead squadron of the 94th let their bombs loose. “Bombs away,” Vickers said.

Jack disengaged the AFCE and took back control of his plane from Vickers. “Okay, boys, let’s go home.” He tried to sound cheerful, but they wouldn’t rendezvous with the Thunderbolts for over an hour.

At the Rally Point, Jack turned west and eased his squadron back into the high position, to the left and slightly behind the lead squadron. Babcock flew the dreaded low slot. Jack didn’t envy his rival, but he didn’t gloat either, despite what Charlie thought.

“Okay, men,” Levitski said, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask. “Enemy aircraft at two o’clock high, also ten o’clock level.”

Had to be over a hundred fighters. Jack squeezed the bag on his oxygen mask to make sure ice hadn’t built up. “Levitski, better do an oxygen check before things get hot.”

He nodded and called through the stations on the interphone. Everyone was conscious.

Jack kneaded the throttles in his hand to keep his airspeed steady. Me 109s and Fw 190s peeled off from the black mass of fighters to rip through the combat boxes. To the south, twin-engined Me 110s paralleled the Fortresses, out of range of the Americans’ .50 caliber machine guns.

One of the Me 110s jiggled. A rocket shot from its wing and smashed into the side of a Fort in the 96th. A horrible explosion shook the formation. Chunks of metal fell. Not one parachute. Eighth Air Force Intelligence said the Luftwaffe had trouble aiming the rockets, but what did they know?

“Here they come, boys.” The bag on Levitski’s mask pulsed quickly, his only sign of anxiety.

Jack glanced down. His bag kept time with Levitski’s.

“Four bogies. Ten o’clock level,” Vickers said. “What I wouldn’t give for my chin turret.”

Silverberg flew a new B-17G model with two .50s in a chin turret below the bombardier’s position. A B-17F,
Sunrise Serenade
had a single .50 straight out the nose. Today Charlie operated Vickers’s chin turret.

One, two, three, four, the Me 109s rolled in, spitting bullets.
Sunrise
’s guns rattled into action, but the fighters concentrated on the low elements in the squadron.

“Nine o’clock high. Two of ’em.”

“Three o’clock level. Four Fw 190s.”

Dividing their fire. The Fort shivered with so many guns firing at once. The acrid smell of cordite filled the cockpit.

“Fogerty’s hit,” Manny Souza called from back in the waist section.

“Mission twenty-five.” Harv hurled curses at the Germans.

“Enough, Harv. Souza, how’s Fogerty?”

“You won’t believe this. Flak vest saved his life. He got knocked flat on his rump, but that bullet’s sticking out from the vest.”

“Fogerty, how do you feel?”

A cough. “Okay. Got me a fine souvenir. Let go of me, Souza. Gotta get ’em back.”

Jack exchanged a relieved look with Levitski and patted the cloth-covered steel plates of his flak vest, its weight reassuring on his torso. Too bad he hadn’t had one back in May. Of course, it wouldn’t have covered his backside, and if it had, he wouldn’t have met Ruth.

Bullets raced toward
Sunrise
and away from
Sunrise
through air electrified with tracers. A sharp crack kicked up the right wing—a twenty-millimeter cannon shell. The propeller hub for engine three was gone, and black oil spewed out. Jack groaned. “Shut down three.”

Levitski pulled the mixture control lever on the center console. “Engine three off. Booster off.”

Jack turned the ignition switch on the console. “Engine three off.”

“Cowl flaps closed.”

“Throttle closed. Harv, when you’ve got a moment, transfer fuel from three to two.”

“When I’ve got a moment? Tell that to Jerry.” Harv swung his guns overhead after a yellow-nosed Fw 190.

Jack looked outside. Chaos. Fighters in every direction, hundreds of them. Forts lagging and tumbling, fighters in flames, white American parachutes and brown German ones.

“Nine o’clock low. Keep an eye on him, Klaus.”

“Fort going down. Six, seven chutes. Eight.”

“I got him. Wow! Look at him fall.”

Jack trimmed the ailerons, wiped sweat from his forehead, and glanced at the clock—1528, only thirty minutes off the target and ages until they met the P-47s.

“We are passing south of Giessen as briefed,” Norman Findlay said from the navigator’s desk. “Our estimated time of arrival is in three hours and twenty-seven minutes.”

“ETA.” A battle raged, and the man tied up the interphone with full terminology.

“Here comes another wave,” Vickers said. “I see them in the distance.”

Swell. They were using a relay system. Would they keep this up all the way to the coast?

“One o’clock high. Ten o’clock high.” The clock numbers spun in Jack’s ears; fighters spun before his eyes.

Harv whooped. “Two 109s collided. They’re both going—oh no! Watch out!” He ducked out of his turret.

Jack looked up. A hunk of wing tumbled toward him. He yanked the wheel and barrel-rolled to the right. As the top plane in the squadron, he had a bit of room to maneuver.

He didn’t have time.

The debris slapped the left wing down. Jack fought the wheel. Felt as if
Sunrise
hit a wall.

He snapped his gaze to the wing. A jagged triangle of metal stuck up—one corner pierced the nacelle of engine one, one corner jammed between the props, and one shimmied in the slipstream.

Levitski spat out an expletive.

Jack wished he could join him. He and Levitski ran through the procedure to shut down number one, but they couldn’t feather the props with that chunk of metal wedged in, and those unfeathered blades pressed flat against the wind and acted as brakes.

Airspeed down to 137.
Sunrise
drifted back in formation. Jack flipped the overhead radio switch and told Silverberg to take the lead, but Silverberg lagged too, his left elevators shot away and engine one windmilling, unable to be feathered. Charlie thought he’d avoid trouble by switching crews, but he hadn’t, and Jack’s problems today had nothing to do with pride.

On the ground, smoke and flames from crashed bombers and fighters marked a straight line from Schweinfurt toward Holland.

Holland. Jack’s feet went cold. The course took them over the Rhine Delta with dozens of watery inlets and marshy islands. He couldn’t think of a worse place to crash or bail.

The 94th Bomb Group passed by. Five planes lagged in the gap between combat wings, easy prey for the Luftwaffe. The last wing of three groups pulled even before the next wave of fighters hit. One of the stragglers fell and several added to their number.

By the time they threaded the narrow corridor between the flak batteries at Bonn and Cologne, the Third Division left Jack and Silverberg behind with ten other planes too scattered to benefit from mutual firepower. If the P-47s didn’t arrive, the enemy would finish them off.

Unless …

“That’s it. We’ll form our own combat box.” Bomber Command frowned on ships helping stragglers, but why couldn’t the wounded band together? Jack called the other B-17s on the radio, and before long a raggedy combat box limped over Germany.

A short-lived victory. They’d passed the rendezvous point for the P-47 escort. How long could they survive? They’d be discovered, hunted, forced into the water to drown.

Jack stuck one finger under the strap of his throat mike to ease the choking sensation.

“Levitski, take the wheel.” He unplugged his headset and oxygen, hooked a portable oxygen bottle to his mask, and dropped into the passageway between the pilots’ seats. He scrambled on hands and knees into the nose compartment. “Findlay, we need a new course.”

“A new course?” he shouted over the engine roar.

Jack leaned over the map on the navigator’s desk with Findlay’s lines penciled in. “Next wave of fighters, we’re dead, all of us. We need to get away.”

Norman stammered about his carefully plotted course, but Jack ignored him and studied the map. If they flew north of the Delta and south of the Zuider Zee, they’d avoid all that inland water.

Jack lined up his course with a ruler. “Here. When we get to the Dutch border, these woods here, we’ll jog northeast about thirty miles, get away from the main bomber stream. Then swing back northwest. Plot it.”

Norman put a gloved finger over the nice solid Dutch land. “But—but there’s Rotterdam, Utrecht, Amsterdam—antiaircraft batteries everywhere.”

“Plot around it.” He put a firm hand on Norman’s shoulder. “You’re the best navigator around. I know you can do it.” Jack returned to the cockpit, where he informed the other pilots that his navigator would radio them a new set of coordinates.

With the skies clear for the moment, Jack trimmed
Sunrise
and had Harv transfer every available drop of fuel from the dead engines.

“Navigator to pilot. I have the coordinates. I transmitted them in coded form to the other aircraft.”

“Thanks, Findlay.”

“Radio to pilot,” Rosetti said. “Silverberg wants to talk to you.”

Jack flipped the radio switch. “Cedar lead to Cedar two.”

“Cedar two. We—well, we have a question about the course. It appears to add some—some distance, not to mention higher flak concentrations.”

“Flak over the coast no matter what. This way we avoid interception.”

“Maybe, but we’ll—we’ll miss our escort.”

“We already have.” How many dissenters were there? Couldn’t they see the beauty of his plan? “We’re on our own, and this is the best course. Trust me.”

“But we’re not sure …”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Listen, have I ever let you down? Trust me.”