After the Messerschmitts had sped off, Farley took the Voice down to two thousand feet to conserve even more fuel. Number Four was leaking now and oil pressure was dropping. Wen reported that he could smell fuel near the bomb bay.
The North Sea was whitecapped and rough two thousand feet below. Farley didn’t think the junkheap bomber was going to make it across. And he sure as hell didn’t like the idea of his crew bobbing like corks in that cold rough water for however long it would take the Allies or the Germans to pick them up—assuming anyone picked them up at all. Turning back to bail out over Holland and Belgium was out, unless they wanted to ride out the war in a stalag. If they weren’t shot after parachuting in.
Farley gave Plavitz their fuel situation and told him to find an English runway in range. The navigator stopped his constant drummer’s paradiddles and hunkered over his charts and did calculations with pencil and paper and worked a ruler and compass on a chart and said he thought they could make the joint RAF/USAAF base at Horsham St. Faith outside Norwich. If not, there were RAF bases along the route—but they were all medium-bomber fields, and Plavitz wasn’t sure about the runways. Farley told him beggars can’t be choosers, and Plavitz sang out coordinates for the nearest field.
The bum-engined bomber took some nursing. They were losing altitude and speed and Farley couldn’t get her to climb. Any slower than this and raising the nose would stall her. Farley told the crew they could either bail into the North Atlantic or take their chances on reaching an airfield.
There hadn’t even been a pause. “We’re with you, cap,” said Wen. The others chimed their agreement.
“All right, then,” Farley told the crew, “let’s clean her out. Everything that isn’t nailed down goes out the window. We don’t have room to be sentimental here.”
“Sentimental, my ass,” came Wen’s gravel voice. “I want to jack her up and slide a whole new bomber under her.” You weren’t supposed to bad-mouth your aircraft, but Wen had pretty much given up by now.
The Voice of America had begun raining guns and gear into the North Sea. Brownings, ammo, parachutes, oxygen tanks, flak suits, helmets, binoculars. Boney wanted to activate the thermite grenade on the Norden bombsight, but Wen convinced him that no German was going to snag the thing on a fish hook before the war was over. Fuel was leaking everywhere and Wen was afraid that setting off the Norden would blow the whole damn aircraft. Boney acquiesced and then heaved the heavy apparatus out the front access hatch. Plavitz sadly patted his sextant and then chucked it out, followed by his entire chart table. He also quietly slipped his drumsticks into his flight suit. None of the other crew would have missed them, but Plavitz would rather go into the drink himself than chuck the pair of sticks he’d been beating since he was old enough to hold them.
Thirty minutes later the bomber was a hundred feet off the water and the English coast was dead ahead. Farley had the throttle shoved forward and his arms were aching from wrestling the control wheel.
“I’m open to suggestions,” he told Broben.
“Set her down on the beach,” his copilot offered. “I can work on my tan.”
“In England?”
“It’s still a beach.”
Farley told the crew he was going to leave the wheels up and try to set her down in the shallows. He ordered them to throw out their heavy flak jackets and be sure they were wearing their mae wests, then take crash positions, which really just meant getting on the floor with a cushion and bracing themselves.
Number Four burped and cut out as Farley was banking left to line up the bomber over a stretch of narrow beach. He put all his weight into turning the control wheel, and he feathered Number Four and told Jerry to cut power to the remaining two engines. Jerry quickly powered down the engines and generators and shut off the fuel lines, and the Voice of America went silent for her last ten seconds of flight.
The North Sea blurred by on the left and England streaked by on the right. Farley kept the nose up and felt the tail touch water. The drag brought the nose down and Farley quickly raised the flaps to help her skim along the surface. They planed along the shallows off the beach like a skipping stone. The bomber breached the chop. The crew were jolted, then slammed forward as the fuselage touched bottom and hissed along the sand. Then the left wing’s leading edge bit water hard and they were thrown around as the bomber slewed left.
The aircraft ground to a halt and yawed to port. Cold seawater poured through the wheelwells and bomb bay doors. The crew scrambled to their feet and got the hell out, each man picturing himself trapped in a huge metal coffin sliding to the bottom of a freezing sea. But the Voice of America had landed in shallow water, and her right half lay fully on the narrow beach as if her captain had ordered her careened.
Farley grabbed the flare gun, and he and Broben helped each other out the window. They slid down the hull and splashed into the cold water and slogged to the raw beach. Farley counted heads while Broben lit a Lucky and stood looking at the Flying Fortress half-submerged in the breaking shallows.
“Keep sailing like that and you’ll make admiral someday, Joseph,” he said.
Farley had scowled at the beached bomber. Waves gurgled against the hull. The water around her stained with leaking oil and fuel. He looked at Wen. “Think they can fix her?” he asked.
Wen spat. “I’m worried they might. She was a dog, I’da shot her five missions ago,” he said.
Farley nodded. Then he handed Wen the flare gun. “Here,” he said. “Put her out of our misery.”
The RAF had picked them up. The Limeys in their fatigues regarding the huge American bomber burning on their shore.
At Horsham St. Faith they were debriefed about the Brunswick mission and then billeted in the most comfortably appointed barracks any of them had seen since joining up. Next morning they hitched a ride with a USAAF supply convoy back to Thurgood, where they found that their billets had been given over to new arrivals and their belongings had been divided up among the squadron, except for personal effects, which had been given to the chaplain to be mailed back home.
No one at Thurgood could believe it when the nine remaining Voice of America crewmen hopped off the Jimmy Deuce outside the mess tent. That night the crew were stood warm beers in the Boiler Room, and no one else realized the survivors were toasting the loss of the Voice of America every bit as much as they were celebrating having made it back alive. They left a glass full for Hansen and nobody mentioned him.
Every man got back every item that had been parceled out, except for the food that had been eaten. Zippos, paperbacks, playing cards, clothes. Francis, their tail gunner, even got back his Shadow comic books.
PART ONE:
THE MISSION
ONE
Shorty perched on the A-frame ladder with six colors of paint in half-cut beer cans jostling on the top step as he worked the brush against the riveted aircraft hull. It was late afternoon on a rare sunny day in Thurgood, but the olive-painted aluminum was still cool and taking the paint well. The long fuselage of the B-17F Flying Fortress slanted down to Shorty’s right, shadow stretching onto the recently constructed concrete taxiway. The Number Two engine propeller was a huge Y behind him.