Bryant tramped to the mess hall feeling more or less outside of himself, a novice actor. The men beside him walked as comically overburdened as Okies fleeing the dust bowl. A boxy jeep crossed through the mist some yards away, pulling connected low wagons each of which carried two clumsy and smallish two-hundred-fifty-pound bombs. Ordnance crews were loading late in some instances. The winch sounds of the bombs being shackled in columns into the bomb bays drifted over to them. Armament crews were checking the gun stations within the bombers, and turrets whirred and whined faintly. He could make out men on the wing of l’se a Muggin’ struggling with the canvas engine covers, cursing and sliding on the slippery metal.
It had rained but it seemed possible the mists were lifting. Puddles along the tarmac shone like mercury. They had combat eggs — real eggs — this mission morning, and spirits picked up because of it. Most of the men were smoking, and the air over the tables, Lewis said, looked like Akron on a bad day. Lewis and Willis Eddy were still talking about the promised B-17 G’s. The G offered the additional armament of a nose turret, but Gabriel and Cooper had heard that the double chin created considerable drag, and that in the event of the loss of one engine, keeping up with the flight would be impossible. Straggling behind was suicide. Willis Eddy’s gunnery scores, besides, were abjectly low, and as bombardier he’d be operating the nose turret. They felt a little better about still not having G’s. They all preferred the greater assurance that they could hide in the pack to the extra guns.
“What happened to the biscuits?” Snowberry complained. “The only thing I liked was the biscuits.”
“No biscuits on game days,” Lewis said. “No beans, either. The gas expands at high altitude. Guys fart like rifle shots. Take a balloon half filled up to twenty thousand feet, it’s filled. Take it to thirty thousand, boom.”
Snowberry looked at his eggs with distaste.
They were checked into the briefing room by MP’s with white leggings filthy from the mud. The gunners sat in a line on benches facing the curtained mission board and immediately checked the yarn pulleys alongside it. A good deal was missing. As they noticed, they became even less happy. The more yarn was missing, the more was on the map and the longer the trip.
They were shoulder to shoulder in the soft and heavy flight jackets, and the smells after the morning air were eye-watering: Kreml hair oil, shaving lotion, sweat, cigarettes. Wet dog, toward the back. “This place is always pure armpit,” Snowberry groused.
Lewis leaned across them and gestured toward the curtain. “I love this. Big security production. In a few minutes we find out what the Nazis’ve known all week.” Men around them coughed and stomped their feet as though to keep warm, and hushed their voices in anticipation like a parody of a theater audience.
The CO entered on schedule and they stood in a noisy mass. He had them sit down again — Lewis blew out his breath heavily, exasperated at the suspense — and nodded to the intelligence officer, who pulled the curtain. The red yarn line ran to Hamburg, and an adjacent enlargement showed U-boat yards.
There were scattered boos. Someone in the back held up a civilian gas conservation sign: Is This Trip Really Necessary?
The overhead projector flashed diagrams and photos of the U-boat yards. Intelligence laid out the route, and the expected reaction from fighters and flak. The officer had written, “Out-lying Flak Batteries Dwarfish by Comparison,” the “Dwarfish” hyphenated at the end of the board, and someone from the back asked in all sincerity, “What’s a Dwar Fish?”
“Don’t worry about the flak,” Snowberry whispered to Bryant. “Official word is that it’s only a deterrent.”
“I’m still trying to figure that one out,” Lewis said.
Operations and Planning provided some last-minute operational data, and Stormy talked about the expected weather changes to and from the city. He drew large billowy cumulus clouds on his own chalkboard to illustrate the expected 20,000-foot ceiling.
They were reminded not to underestimate the enemy, a bit of advice they found as gratuitous as anything they had heard since their induction. The gunners were reminded to harmonize at 250 yards, and to remember the bullet streams would converge at that distance and then begin to diverge.
The crews were glum and attentive. They always half hoped for unimportant targets, targets which would not stir the Germans into anything more than their usual hostility.
The CO announced the time and they all set their minute hands to it, and he called “Hack!” and they started their watches again.
“Good luck,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”
“What?” someone asked.
The group broke up, navigators heading off in one direction, bombardiers and radio ops to pick up their information sheets, the gunners to the flight line lockers. Piacenti, Ball, Lewis, Snowberry, and Bryant walked in a line carrying parachutes and flak vests to the armament shop to pick up their guns. They piled everything into two jeeps and rode to Paper Doll minutes ahead of everyone else.
The guns were slid into their steel frames and locked in the stowed position for takeoff. The turrets were turned to face the rear. The five of them stood beside the plane, checking the layers of gear and waiting for the rest of the crew. Bryant hunched near the enplaning hatch on the fog-colored underside and dandled his finger around the connecting ring of his oxygen hose. Lewis went off into the mist a few feet and urinated through the circle of his thumb and forefinger.
Gabriel arrived with everyone else and gathered the group in a circle for some final instructions. He talked about the need to communicate on the bogies but to otherwise stay off the interphone. He cautioned Snowberry and Bryant to keep alert for fighters at twelve o’clock high and low, and said some of the scuttlebutt was there’d be a big diversionary raid which might tie up a lot of interceptors to the south. Snowberry was wearing a button he’d gotten from the New York World’s Fair, which read I Have Seen the Future. Gabriel peered at it, and asked if there were any questions. His cap had been pummeled and soaked in water to affect the fifty-mission crush, and when he moved, his unconnected oxygen hose and interphone cable flapped and gestured.
No one else spoke. They lined up to enplane.
“Do the bear dance, Bean,” Snowberry said, and Bean startled Bryant by hopping from one foot to another, back and forth, looking for all the world in his heavy gear and flight suit like a dancing bear. They had all seen this before, and laughed affectionately. Bryant had not. He felt suddenly he was outside even this group. When had Bean started a bear routine? Who had encouraged it?
Piacenti, climbing in ahead of him, turned and displayed an old orange warning tag from the Norden bombsight, and grinned. He slipped it inside his flight jacket and clambered up into the hatch.
Bryant hesitated before the opening, having missed the point.
“Do-it-yourself superstition,” Lambert Ball said behind him. “Can’t beat it.”
They individually ran their preflight checklists from their dark stations, calling in over the interphone. Bryant stood at the flight engineer’s panel and then at Gabriel and Cooper’s shoulders, double-checking their run-through.
They waited. A full hour passed. Bryant felt as if he were wearing a constricting and damp pile of laundry. “Stormy, if you’re wrong, we’re gonna kick your fucking ass,” Lewis murmured over the interphone. They heard rain patter lightly on the fuselage and everybody groaned.
“Isn’t this weather something?” Piacenti cried. He sounded stuffed up. “Sun for the tail and rain for the nose.” Their chatty informality over the interphone was not official operating procedure, but among the crews a certain amount of radio sloppiness was considered masculine.