Bomber Command, the CO mentioned with exaggerated care, had reason to believe that the gunnery instructors back in the States had not been as precise in their scoring of cadet shooting as they might have been. The comment got a big roar of laughter from the aircrews. A month earlier in one of those spectacularly embarrassing incidents the Air Corps seemed able to produce every four weeks or so, one of the target-towing Bostons had been shot down. The Brit pilot had hit the silk so angry he had brandished a revolver at the contrite B-17’s that flew past his chute.
Bryant found himself climbing with Paper Doll up through white cumulus clouds and gray sky. Lewis was singing a parody of “Into the Air, Army Airmen” over the interphone: Into the air, Junior Birdman, get your ass into the blue. The plane banked sharply and he knew he was supposed to be remaining vigilant in his lookout for the assembly plane and others, but the view through breaks in the cloud entranced him: visibility distended in a pleasant and sleepy way by a slight haze all the way to the Dutch coast and deep into France, the muted colors receding into the curvature of the earth. The earth closer to home resembled the subdivided palette of Robin’s paintbox. Cooper had switched the crew’s interphone to Liaison, and Bean tuned them into the BBC, and they climbed higher into the great chamber of air above the cloud cover listening to an alto voice singing opera.
Hirsch spotted the assembly plane and within minutes they had slipped into a slot above it and behind Geezil II and Leave Me Home, which had achieved its name by three times developing engine trouble on the transoceanic flight to England and three times having had to turn back.
They found themselves enduring the usual casually harrowing jockeying and shifting in formation as they circled in an ever-growing group, the clouds like shoals beneath them. Bryant could hear the guff Gabriel and Cooper were taking — Close it up! Close up the formation, goddamnit! — from the pilot of the lead plane.
From above and behind, three more 17’s appeared and drifted down to them. Bryant called them in to Gabriel and said aloud, Now where’re they coming from? They eased terrifyingly close and suddenly everyone in Paper Doll was shouting, as if the other crew could hear. Gabriel had no room to maneuver and shouted as much back in response over the interphone when they yelled for evasive action. The closest 17 bobbed higher with an infuriating casualness after having dipped so low that its ball turret had been momentarily level with Bryant in his dorsal. The ball turret gunner had waved.
They had been badly frightened and were glad to be among the first to land, an hour later. They were standing outside of Paper Doll waiting for the jeeps when Lemon Drop came in with a crushed tail from a collision somewhere in the clouds, its engines straining, the emergency trucks clanging, and Lemon Drop swung to the right as it swept in over the tarmac, hesitating with its left wing dipped, and then that wing caught the concrete and the immense plane smashed and concertinaed as they watched, a body cartwheeling out.
The radio operator survived. There was no fire. The plane had shattered into pieces spread over the runway like a junkyard. They had sprinted over to help the emergency crews, and Lewis and Bryant had come across in the cockpit section only the co-pilot’s flying boot, wedged beneath a rudder pedal, a bone jutting up from within like the stalk of an immature flower. When the shock had worn off, Bryant’s first clear thought, lying on his bunk, was that they were all dying like ants, or pets, or foreigners — they were all dying now as part of a routine.
He lay still. When he woke he was damp. The hut was gloomy and he guessed he had missed dinner. Something nearby smelled like aluminum. On the bunk beside him Snowberry lay face into the pillow with his hands hanging together off the edge like a victim of an exotic torture. Lewis was on his own bunk beyond, shifting his rear to test the sounds of various farts. Piacenti sat upright with his legs over the side and his head in his hands. It looked to Bryant like a training film illustration of Low Morale.
“I want to go home,” Snowberry said. His voice came from deep within the pillow.
“For serious drinking the boys had a table the shape of Texas. Cut it out of sheet metal,” Lewis said. He had spent his leave with friends in the 92nd. “We were playing Drink the Cities. We were on Galveston or Houston and somebody said, Toast. There was that point when no one knew what to drink to, and some little gunner who’d had his nose smashed over Aachen said, Yo Momma. It was just right.”
Snowberry had not moved and it looked to Bryant as if he’d stopped breathing. Lewis was chewing on a tightly rolled piece of paper and did not seem to be deriving pleasure from his story. He had a photo of Gene Tierney over his bed, under a handwritten sign that said Do Not Hump, and he was stroking her behind absently with his hand in his flying glove. “Now this may be a bunch of guys who appreciate the grotesque no more than seven seconds running in their whole life. But I swear I do love to see the forces come together.”
“I was figuring it out, on the ride in,” Snowberry said after a silent and dismal pause. “I don’t think we can go to chow anymore without fifteen percent casualties.”
“The last big party we had,” Lewis said, “it was after a big mission. We had WAAF’s and WAAC’s and Red Cross Girls and Wrens and local girls, you know, nice girls, and they were all standing around or sitting in these little groups. We kept thinking, how’d we get so lucky? Why are there so many girls here? Then it hit us: they were all the dates of the missing guys. We’d lost eight planes. Eighty guys. They’re all standing around, all dressed up.”
“Big night for sloppy seconds,” Piacenti said.
“One little girl musta started getting dressed four hours before she came. She was at a table with some other girls and they were ignoring her, you know, trying to at least have a good time. She was crying. I went over and talked to her.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Piacenti said. He believed Lewis to be a real tail hound.
“I told her it was just arithmetic,” Lewis said gently, as if the subject had been inevitable and infinitely dreary. “If each group has to do X number of missions and loses Y number of men with each mission, how soon before all the original men are history?”
“I worry about fire,” Piacenti said. “You know, you’re caught inside and there’s fire.”
Lewis chewed and the paper moved around his mouth like a toothpick. “This guy in the 92nd had this photo of all the squadron Forts lined up the week he’d arrived. He showed it to me? All of them are gone now. None left. You ever wonder why they don’t have battle-weary B-17’s pulling things around?”
He spat the paper high above the bunk in a startling parabola. “It’s simple, Dick Ott used to say. You’re in a game and you need to score twenty-five. Before you run into the Glass Mountain.”
The Glass Mountain was a squadron term for fatal and spectacular disasters in the skies, as in, This or that ship ran into the Glass Mountain. It had to do with the effect achieved when a heavy bomber was hit by flak while flying straight and level.
“Roasting to death,” Piacenti repeated. He shivered, and rubbed his neck. “That’s what really scares me.”