“I know,” Phips muttered. Despite the cold, he was sweating profusely.
The tail gunner, Sergeant Ballard, broke in. At thirty, he was the old man and his deep voice had a calming effect. “Skipper, it looks like one of them is pulling back. Maybe he’s running out of fuel.”
Phips prayed it was so. The ME only had a range of about three hundred miles and must have used up a lot of gas chasing the bombers around the sky. Maybe the second one would have the same problem.
No such luck. As time dragged on, the lone ME stayed behind them, darting in and out, firing an occasional burst, and looking for an opportunity to make a kill. The German respected the bomber’s many guns, which fired short bursts every time he got within range. It looked like an impasse but it wasn’t. As long as he had fuel, the German held all the trump cards. At least they were low enough that the men of Mother’s Milk didn’t need oxygen to breathe.
“Skipper, will you take a suggestion from your beloved navigator?”
Phips managed a weak smile. “Yes, Mr. Kent.”
“We are getting farther and farther away from Mother England. If you want me to find our way home, we’ve got to stop this running shit and head back.”
Damn it, Phips thought. It was time to make up for his mistake. “Okay, we turn and attack the bastard.”
The German must have thought that the plane’s sudden and sharp banking to the right was an indication of damage and he dashed in for the kill with his machine guns and 20mm cannon blazing. Pieces flew off the bomber, and Phips heard shouting through his headset. Loose items caromed off the inside of the hull.
“Carson’s hit!” someone yelled. Christ, Phips thought. One of the waist gunners was down. “Oh, Jesus, he’s bleeding all over the place.” The wounded man’s screams carried up to Phips, who felt nauseated as the bomber continued its stately turn.
Suddenly, the German fighter pilot found himself facing an array of. 50 caliber machine guns from the side, top, and belly that spewed torrents of bullets in his direction. Now it was the German’s turn to panic and he tried to escape. As he did so, he exposed the belly of his plane for just an instant. A handful of bullets ripped through his engine. It started to smoke and the ME began to fall back.
“Christ almighty,” yelled Stover. “We got us a kill.”
The German pilot fell from the plane and a parachute opened. The ME was gone, but the pilot would live to fight another day. Now the Mother’s Milk had to do the same damn thing-live to fight another day.
“How’s Carson?” Phips asked.
“Dead, sir.”
Phips sagged over the controls. His first mission and not only had he disobeyed orders to keep formation, but he’d gotten lost, and a crewman, one of the guys he’d been with for six months, had been killed. Now he had to make sure this miserable situation didn’t get any worse.
“Navigator,” said Phips. “Where are we?”
“Over Germany, Skipper.”
Damn smart aleck, Phips thought. “Can you possible narrow that down, Kent?”
“Seriously Skipper, I’m trying, but we were all over the sky for a little while and I need a frame of reference. I think we’re over East Prussia and now we are heading towards Russia. I suggest we turn north and west and hope to God we find something that makes sense, like the Baltic Sea. I also suggest we lighten our load. We’ve got a few tons of bombs doing nothing but weighing us down and using up our fuel.”
Stover turned toward Phips, his expression still unforgiving. “We can go north to Sweden if we have to, bail out, and be interned. That assumes, of course, that we can even find Sweden.”
“Yeah,” Phips responded angrily, “and we’d be interned for the duration of the war and who knows how long that’ll be. The experts say it’ll be over in a few months, but with our luck it might just be decades. It also presumes that the Swedes won’t turn us over to the Nazis. I hear the Swedes spend a lot of time kissing Hitler’s ass since the krauts are right next door to them. And, oh yeah, we might just accidentally bail out over Nazi-occupied Norway or over those nice people in Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
It was common knowledge that Russia had interned some American and British fliers and wasn’t keen on returning them. Winding up chopping frozen rocks in Siberia was not a pleasant option.
Kent chimed in. “Again, I suggest we turn north and west in hopes of finding the Baltic. At that point, I further suggest we stay over the water until we hit Denmark, and I mean that figuratively and not literally.”
“Good.” agreed Phips. “And then we can cut the angle by flying over Denmark. I don’t think the krauts will waste sending fighters after one lousy lost bomber.” Of course, he thought, nobody thought their little flight of eighteen bombers would have been attacked by so many German fighters.
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” Kent said, and Stover sullenly nodded agreement. “But when are you going to dump the bombs? We will need that fuel if we’re going to make it back.”
“I don’t have a target,” Phips said.
Stover shook his head in disbelief. “Christ, Chief, we’re only a couple of thousand feet over Germany. The whole fucking country’s a target. Just drop the damn things.”
Phips thought for a second and decided he agreed. Finally he felt he was doing the right thing. Maybe he could recover from this nightmarish day. Back in England, he’d be criticized for his mistakes and the loss of Carson, but maybe, just maybe, he’d be allowed to learn from those mistakes and fly again. Regardless, his first job was to get his crew home.
“Just for the record,” he said, “does anybody see anything that even remotely looks like it could use a good bombing?”
Stover’s eyes were the sharpest. “Looks like a cluster of buildings coming up in the woods to our right front. And I don’t see any red crosses or anything.”
“Got it,” said Cullen, the combination nose gunner and bombardier. “We’ll use the Norden and drop bombs in their helmets.”
It was a feeble attempt at a joke. The super-secret Norden bomb-sight was better than what anybody’d had before, but it was far from precise. Even at their low altitude, they’d be lucky to hit the compound.
“What the hell?” Phips said in surprise. Antiaircraft guns had opened up at the last second and black puffs of flak were exploding well above them. Whoever was down there was as surprised as he was. At least their shooting was off.
The bomb bay doors opened and more cold wind whipped through the plane. They might be closer to the ground and it might be the middle of summer, but it was still like being in a savage winter storm. A few seconds later, the bombs fell, and Mother’s Milk, freed from their weight, lifted. Now Phips and the Milkmen really began to feel that they might just make it back to England.
“Anybody see if we hit anything?” Phips asked.
The only one with a view of the target was Ballard, the tail gunner. “Well, sir, we did hit the ground. Seriously, some of the bombs did fall in that cluster of buildings. Not a clue as to what kind of damage we might have caused. Looks like we’ve outrun the flak, though.”
And we’ll probably never know what we hit, Phips thought. An unwanted realization popped into his head. If they did make it back, he’d have to write a letter to Carson’s family explaining how he’d died heroically and painlessly when the poor guy had really died screaming and bleeding all over the plane like a stuck pig.
A few hours later they had crossed Denmark and were again over water. They sighted a gray smudge on the horizon. Kent assured Phips it was England, Mother England, and they all breathed a sigh of relief. They were very low on fuel. A pair of British Hurricanes flew by and took up position on either side. They were used to nursing cripples and would guide Mother’s Milk back to an airfield. They’d be on fumes when they landed, but they had made it. It was the middle of June 1944. Allies had landed in Normandy and the men of the Mother’s Milk were still part of the war.
Finally, Phips could relax. He did wonder just what they had managed to bomb on their first and so far only run over Germany. He hoped to God it wasn’t a girls’ school or an orphanage. But then, how many girls schools were protected by antiaircraft guns?
Colonel Ernst Varner walked away from the undistinguished one-story wood building that was jammed with the military hierarchy of the Third Reich. For the moment it was the site of the OKW, the Oberkommando der
