Just One Catch (14 page)

Second, a week before Heller arrived on Corsica, in the early-morning hours of May 13, eighty JU-88 medium bombers from the German Luftwaffe flew in low, accompanied by several Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighter planes. They bombed and strafed the base for an hour and a half, killing twenty-four men and wounding over two hundred others, shattering sixty-five planes, and blowing up the gas dump. The raid came in response to the U.S. policy of dropping phosphorus bombs on antiaircraft gunners, a policy that Germany claimed was a breach of the Geneva Conference.

On May 13, right before the German planes dived out of darkness in wave after wave after wave, a single twin-engined British Beaufighter appeared above the base, dropping lighted flares to guide the main force in. Later, U.S. commanders speculated that the Germans had captured this plane and left its British markings intact to trick the Americans. The attack left craters in the roads that were still gaping and smoking when Heller landed on the base. Wrecked airplane parts littered runway edges. The men were jittery. “A few practice shots from the field had everybody in their slit trenches for a while the other night,” stated the 487th's War Diary for May 29. “Some weren't aware that it was only practice and others were avoiding falling shrapnel.” The diary entry for the next night read: “Two air raid alerts got the boys out of bed twice during the evening.” Following the German attack, some men moved their tents into concealed wooded areas. One group kept its tent where it was, out in the open—the men had spent too much time customizing it to take it apart; besides, they figured if the Germans returned, they wouldn't bother with a single isolated tent.

Soon after settling in, Heller was assigned one of his tent mates, a stumpy, taciturn boy from Kentucky named Edward Ritter, “something of a tireless wonder as a handyman, one with unlimited patience who took pleasure in making and fixing things,” Heller wrote. Ritter transformed the tent into a cozy home by constructing a fireplace, complete with a mantelpiece made from an old railroad tie, on which the boys placed photographs of buxom Hollywood actresses. Ritter also fashioned a stove that drew fuel from an outside can and dribbled it onto sand inside a metal drum placed near the tent's center pole. His constant tinkering with items irritated Heller, but the Brooklyn boy admired his buddy's ingenuity and soon marveled at his imperturbability in combat: On at least three occasions, Ritter would either crash-land or bring a damaged plane back safely, never showing “symptoms of fear or growing nervousness, even blushing with a chuckle and a smile whenever I gagged around about him as a jinx,” Heller wrote.

Next door lived Francis Yohannan, in a space he shared with, among others, a boy named Joe Chrenko. Soon, on R & R trips to Rome, Chrenko would pass himself off as a
Life
photographer so he could smooth-talk girls into posing for him. In Rome one day, Yohannan bought a golden cocker spaniel, which also came to live in his tent.

The men Heller met, hailing from all parts of the United States, were so distinctive, and uniquely different from the Brooklyn lads he'd known, they seemed to him like characters from a novel, and he noted with amusement their features, habits, and personal characteristics: Col. Willis F. Chapman, the group commander, who always walked around with an elaborate cigarette holder in his mouth; Capt. Vincent Myers, a half-Comanche from Cameron, Oklahoma, a square-shouldered Golden Gloves boxer whom everyone called “the Chief”; the pale, bird-thin Doc Marino, whom Heller had met in South Carolina; and Chaplain James H. Cooper, a shy, pimple-faced fellow from Ohio who lived alone in a tent in the woods, slightly separated from the other men, puffing at night on a tiny corncob pipe.

*   *   *

EARLY IN 1944
, the U.S. Army Air Corps mounted a massive bombing campaign against German aircraft production centers in Berlin. Combined with the German defeat in North Africa, in May 1943, and the push the Allies were making toward Rome, U.S. commanders hoped the war in Europe had turned in their favor. Troop morale was generally high. It was the task of the 340th Bombardment Group to provide support to frontline divisions, and to the main European air offensive, by disrupting German supply lines and communications, destroying roads, railway tracks, and bridges in Italy, France, Austria, and Yugoslavia. The Germans' main supply route to the Italian front from central Europe was through the Brenner Pass, in the Alps, and many of the group's missions concentrated on that region.

In June, the Allies drove the Germans out of Rome and invaded Normandy. However, what most concerned the men of the 340th was the number of missions they had to fly, and the unnerving accuracy of the German 88-mm cannons, particularly at the marshaling yards of Rimini and Ferrara, as well as at the Bologna supply dump—frequent bombing targets. The cannons, the
Fliegerabwehrkanone
(flak, for short), fired twenty-pound shells to over forty thousand feet; the shells then exploded, spraying the air with hundreds of swarming metal shards. To achieve maximum accuracy on their bombing runs, the American B-25s came in at between seven thousand and twelve thousand feet, making them highly vulnerable to flak. Furthermore, over some targets in the Brenner Pass, in the midst of steep mountain shadows, the planes often banked
beneath
the highest peaks, and the Germans fired at them from above.

Frequently, the B-25 crews flew two missions a day. Since they operated behind the front, they traveled fairly short distances and rarely encountered enemy planes. They called their missions “milk runs,” to denote their relative ease. Because of this, the B-25 mission limit was higher than that of the B-17s and B-24s on the front lines. In May 1944, when Heller arrived on Corsica, the limit was fifty for the Mitchell medium bombers. On June 22, the 487th's War Diary reported, “Word is going around that any combat crew member who has not put in one year of overseas duty will fly 70 missions before returning to the Z of I [zone of interior—that is, the United States] which is quite a leap from the prescribed fifty missions to a tour. Quite naturally this isn't going over too big with the boys.…”

Soon thereafter, General Knapp at Wing Headquarters confirmed the raised mission limit. There was a flight crew shortage, he said. Daniel Setzer, who has studied the 340th's time on Corsica, believes the limit rose for another reason. “Mussolini was gone [by the summer of 1944] and Italy had joined the Allies,” he says. “Rome had fallen. The Germans were being pushed back by the Russians on the Eastern front. The US successfully invaded France … it was clear to everyone that, barring a miracle, Germany could not win and its army would soon lose the will to continue fighting what was quickly becoming a futile war. Our army planners must have felt that one more concerted push using experienced flight crews would do more to insure victory than continu[ing] to bring [fresh troops] to the European theater.” Besides, Setzer says, “military planners were already turning their thoughts to the defeat of Japan.”

At the start of his tour, Heller wasn't troubled by forthcoming assignments. “I wanted to see what was happening.… What I'd seen in the movies,” he explained. “I wanted to see parachutes. I wanted to see planes going down in flame. And I would say close to half my missions were milk runs. There were no German fighters in Italy by the time I got overseas. So all the opposition came from anti-aircraft fire, and if I went on missions and … there was [not] any [flak,] I was disappointed. I was stupid.”

The novelist William Styron, a fellow veteran of the European war, put it another way. “[The] smell of romance … is what you got for going off … and getting your ass shot off,” he said. “And that is, to me … the metaphor for the strange bargain one makes as a young man, going off to war. The allure was so extraordinary, the allure, the glamour, the gold bars, the tailored uniform—for what? To … get your ass shot off.”

Yet few of the men questioned the war's rationale. “I saw it as a war of necessity,” Heller said. “Everybody did.… Pearl Harbor united this country in a strong and wholesome and healthy way.” And at first, island life for him was relatively “comfortable,” he recalled. “[A]ll decisions were made for me, and I found I liked that … because none of the decisions being made seemed to be particularly abusive. I was being treated very well, even by the German anti-aircraft fighters.”

*   *   *

IN THE FORMERLY SECRET
, now declassified, “History [of the] 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bombardment Group,” compiled by Captains Homer B. Howard and Everett B. Thomas, the primary goal of the group, in Heller's time, was “Medium level bombing of bridges,” with the secondary, “low level” aim of “strafing … gun positions.” Heller flew his first mission on May 24 over Poggibonsi. The night before, he received his assignment and knew he'd be flying with Joe Chrenko. At a briefing with the pilots, he was handed maps and a list of targets. The maps indicated all known antiaircraft gun positions.

He was issued a flak suit—essentially an apron with metal plates sewn inside it—a fleece-lined leather flight suit, and a parachute. After breakfast, the following morning, he and the rest of the crew were driven in a large truck to a plane sitting on a runway. The ground crew, charged with maintaining the plane (often, these men slept on the runways beneath the B-25s), had stocked the bomb bay, loaded the machine guns, fueled the plane, and patched the flak holes it had gotten on previous missions.

Heller, quiet, tense, apprehensive, peed in the field and then slipped inside the “hothouse.”

The engines boomed (there were no mufflers, and the exhaust system consisted of just a simple straight pipe). Once in the air, the gunners fired a few rounds into space, a test, and then everyone concentrated on their individual tasks. On the mission to Poggibonsi, thirteen planes coordinated their movements, settling into tight formations known as “boxes,” each box consisting of six Mitchells (with one extra bomber, in this case). The box was a vertical and horizontal arrangement of half a dozen planes, configured in such a way that they could protect one another and maintain a precise pattern for the drop.

A Mitchell B-25 could carry up to three tons of explosives.

A fifty-caliber machine gun swung on a ball swivel in front of Heller's face. On this particular flight, he didn't have a Norden bombsight. He had been told to tug his toggle switch the instant he saw the bomb-bay doors open on the lead plane.

The account of the mission in the squadron history recorded “many direct hits” on the railroad tracks leading to the main target—the bridge—with “possible hits on the bridge itself.” None of these “possible hits” was Heller's. Nervous and distracted, he had released his bombs too late, and he knew it. Flak activity was “nil.”

Later that day, he flew a second mission, this time to Orvieto. “Scant and inaccurate” flak; “complete overcast on target[;] cumulus up to 20,000 [feet],” said the report. The planes returned to base without releasing their bombs.

He had done it: survived his first day. No one had shot at him—either that or they had missed by miles. Maybe this was going to be a cinch.

He flew seven more missions that May, encountering “meager, inaccurate” flak on just two occasions. Over Tivoli, on the morning of May 26, he and his group “failed to spot the target,” a railroad junction, and “laid a compact pattern” somewhere west of their goal. Almost as an afterthought, the account concludes, “A hospital along side the primary target received several direct hits.” The following day, with “ground haze” obscuring the target, a railroad bridge at Pietrasanta, he wasn't sure what he'd struck, but his group dropped ninety-six five-hundred-pound bombs. On the twenty-ninth, twelve Mitchells, including Heller's, pounded a viaduct at Bucine (about twenty-five miles southeast of Florence) with forty-eight one-thousand-pound bombs. They scored direct hits, but the report noted that, prior to the drop, crewmen observed what “appeared to be a gaping hole in the center of the viaduct from previous bombings.”

Missions completed, the crews checked in their flak suits and parachutes, collected ritual shots of whiskey, and returned to their tents to tell stories of the day and mix drinks in their infantry helmets.

*   *   *

ON QUIET NIGHTS
, when the air was mildly gusty, and the constant rustle of a tent flap sounded like a man marching determinedly to the ends of the earth, Heller swore he heard the dead Okie snore.

*   *   *

FROM THE AIR
, the island's tidy shape resembled a battleship. The men called it the “USS
Corsica.
” Sometimes they felt as cramped, living on the island, as if they
were
stuck in the hold of a ship. In sunny weather, the countryside was pretty: silhouetted saw-toothed mountains, cork trees, and groves of bamboo, a gently canted terrain covered with flinty soil, and curling, blue-green waves lapping nearby beaches. But the men grew restless contemplating beauty. Their fishing privileges were severely restricted, so they wouldn't hamper the natives' livelihoods. A movie screen stood on a hillside, but the army's choice of films was rarely inspiring (Deanna Durbin in
Honeymoon Lodge
was shown the night after the attack on the Bucine viaduct). “People think it's a joke when I say that [among soldiers] the most hated man in the world was not Adolf Hitler. He was Frank Sinatra,” William Manchester said at the USC symposium. “[W]e would see pictures of Frank Sinatra, who was surrounded by girls our age, trying to kiss him,” and the men would yell. Whenever Special Services showed up to screen sex-safety films, the corpsmen hooted and laughed themselves sick.

Sickness often restricted activities, recreational and otherwise. Soldiers “had dysentery all the time,” Paul Fussell recalled. “You can imagine how hard it is to believe in the high and noble purpose of the war when you can't control your own bowels, and you come up to the … commander to make a snappy report on something and all of the sudden your bowels move, noisily, right there, and perhaps his do as well, only he's a major or lieutenant colonel. This is the atmosphere. Everything is a mess all the time.” The misery was compounded by frequent heavy rains. “[H]alf the squadron was inundated” by a particular downpour, stated an entry in the War Diary. “[S]everal inches of water … tended to make a rowboat out of [each of our] happy homes.” On wet nights, Heller huddled beneath a poncho, next to Ritter's stove, adding up the money orders he planned to send home—sometimes four hundred bucks a pop.