talk a lot.”
The six men of the F for Freddie crew gathered under a naked light in a hallway for a last word from Flight Lieutenant Killian, reading notes on a clipboard. Aside from the theatrical-looking flying suits and life vests, they seemed like any half-dozen young men off any London street. The wireless operator was thin and somewhat ratty; the rear gunner was a fresh-faced boy — almost a child, thought Pug thought — on his first operational flight; the pimply front gunner vulgarly worked chewing gum in long jaws. Only their nervy, apprehensive, adventurous, and cheerful look was unusual.
The warm night was studded with summer stars: Vega, Deneb, Altair, Arcturus — the old navigation aids reliably twinkling away. The senior pilot went aboard the plane. The crew lounged on the grass nearby.
“F for Freddie,” said the sergeant pilot, giving the fuselage a loud affectionate slap. “Been through many a long sweat, Admiral.”
This was how Pug found out that a Wellington bomber had a skin of fabric. The slapped cloth sounded just like what it was. He was used to his Navy’s metal aircraft. It never occurred to him that the British could use fabric planes as attack bombers, and this piece of intelligence had not come his way, for he was not an aviator. Victor Henry could still have walked away from the flight, but he felt as compelled to enter this cloth plane and fly over Berlin as a murderer is to climb a gallows to be hanged. In the sweet-smelling quiet night, plaintive birdsongs rose here and there, richly warbling and rolling.
“Ever heard nightingales before?” said Tiny Johnson.
“No, I never have.”
“Well, Admiral, you’re hearing nightingales.”
Far down the field, one plane after another coughed and began to roar, shooting out flames in the darkness. A truck rolled up to F for Freddie. A mechanic plugged a cable into its fuselage. The motors caught and turned over, spitting smoke and fire, as other planes trundled to a dimly lit runway and thundered up and away into gauzy blue moonlight. Soon only F for Freddie was left, its crew still lying on the grass, its spinning motors cherry red. All at once the engines shut off.
Pug heard nightingales again.
“Eh? What now?” said Tiny. “Don’t tell me we’ve been scrubbed, due to some splendid, lovely engine trouble?”
Mechanics came trotting out and worked rapidly on one engine, with many a vile cheerful curse, their tools clanking musically in the open air. Twenty minutes after the other planes left, F for Freddie took off and flew out over the North Sea.
After what seemed a half hour of bumping through cold air in a dark shaking machine, Pug glanced at his watch. Only seven minutes had gone by. The crew did not talk. The intercom crackled and buzzed — the helmet, unlike the rest of his clothing, was too tight and hurt his ears — but once the plane left the coast on course, the pilots and navigator shut up. Victor Henry’s perspiration from the heavy suit cooled and dried, chilling him. His watch crawled through twenty more minutes as he sat there. The lieutenant gestured to him to look through the plexiglass blister where the navigator had been taking star sights, and then to stretch out prone in the nose bubble, the bombardier position. Pug did these things, but there was nothing to see but black water, bright moon, and jewelled stars.
“Keep that light down, navigator,” the lieutenant croaked.
The sergeant who had given Pug the toilet paper was marking a chart on a tiny fold-down wooden slat, and trying to squelch the dim beam of an amber flashlight with his fingers. Crouching beside him, watching him struggle with star tables, star sight forms, dividers, ruler, and flashlight, Pug wondered what kind of navigational fix he possibly come up with. The youngster gave him a grin. Pug took the flashlight from his hands and shielded the beam to strike just the chart. Peters gestured gratitude and Pug squatted there, cramped in the space behind the two pilots, until the navigator had finished his work. The American had imagined that the long-range British bomber would be as big as an airliner, with a control cabin offering ample elbow room. In fact five men crowded within inches of each other — the two pilots, the front gunner, the navigator, and the wireless operator. Pug could just see the gunner in the forward bubble, in faint moonlight. The others were faces floating in the row of dials.
Stumbling, crouching, grasping at guy wires, Pug dragged his parachute down the black fuselage to the bubble where the rear gunner sat. The hatless boy, his bushy hair falling in his face, gave him a thumbs-up and a pathetic smile. This was a hell of a lonely, shaky, frigid place to be riding Pug thought. The bomber’s tail was whipping and bouncing badly. He tried to yell over the noise and motor roars, then made a hopeless gesture. The boy nodded, and proudly operated his power turret for him. Pug groped to a clear space in the fuselage, and squatted on his parachute, hugging his knees. There was nothing to do. It was getting colder and colder. He took something from his ration bag — when he put it in his mouth, he tasted chocolate — and sucked it. He dozed.
Garbled voices in his ear woke him. His nose was numb, his cheeks felt frostbitten, and he was shivering. A hand in the dark tugged him forward. He stumbled after the vague figure toward the cockpit glow. Suddenly it was light as day in the plane. The plane slanted and dived, and Pug Henry fell, bruising his forehead on a metal box. Rearing up on his hands and knees, he saw the bright light go out, come on and go out again as though snapped off. The plane made sickening turns one way and another while he crawled forward.
Tiny Johnson, gripping the controls, turned around, and Pug saw his lips move against the microphone. “Okay, Admiral?” The voice gargled in the intercom. “Just passing the coast searchlight belt.”
“Okay,” Henry said.
The helmeted lieutenant threw a tight grim glance over his shoulder at Henry, then stared ahead into the night.
Tiny waved a gloved hand at a fixture labelled OXYGEN. “Plug in, and come and have a look.”
Sucking on rubber-tasting enriched air, Pug crawled into the bombardier position.
Instead of sparkling sea he saw land grayed over by moonlight. The searchlight beams waved behind them. Straight below, tiny yellow lights winked. Red and orange balls came floating slowly and gently up from these lights, speeding and getting bigger as they rose. A few burst and showered red streaks and sparks. Several balls passed ahead of the plane and on either side of it, flashing upward in blurry streaks of color.
The voice of Tiny said, “Coast flak was heavier last time.”
Just as he said this something purple-white and painfully brilliant exploded in Victor Henry’s face. Blackness ensued, then a dance of green circles. Pug Henry lay with his face pressed to cold plexiglass, sucking on the oxygen tube, stunned and blind.
A hand grasped his. The voice of Peters, the navigator, rattled in his ear. “That was a magnesium flash shell. Ruddy close, Admiral. Are you all right?”
“I can’t see.”
“It’ll take a while. Sit up, sir.”
The plane ground ahead, the blindness persisted and persisted, then the green circles jerked in a brightening red mist. A picture gradually faded in like a movie scene: faces lit by dials and the gunner in moonlight. Until his vision returned, Victor Henry spent nasty minutes wondering whether it would. Ahead he saw clouds, the first of this trip, billowing up under the moon.
The navigator spoke. “Should be seeing beams and flak now.”
“Nothing,” said Lieutenant Killian. “Black night.”
“I’ve got Berlin bearing dead ahead at thirty miles, sir.”
“Something’s wrong. Probably your wind drift again.”
“D.F. bearings check out, sir.”
“Well, damn it, Peters, that doesn’t put Berlin up ahead.” The skipper sounded annoyed but unworried. “It looks like solid forest down there, clear across the horizon. Featureless and black.”
Tiny Johnson observed bitterly that on his last raid almost half of the of the planes had failed altogether to find Berlin, and that none of Bomber Command’s official navigational procedures were worth a shit. He added that he was brassed off.
The piping voice of the rear gunner broke in to report searchlights far astern, off to the right. At almost the same time, the pilots saw, and pointed out to Victor Henry, a large fire on the horizon ahead: a yellow blotch flickering on the moonlit plain. After some crisp talk on the intercom, Lieutenant Killian swung the plane around and headed for the searchlights; as for the fire, his guess was another bomber had overshot the mark and then gone ahead and bombed the wrong target. “
