Every crew member could hear the mechanical whirring as the bomb bay doors opened. Lucky Girl shuddered and a different pitch or sound filled the plane, which was now exposed to the terrible cold of high altitude Germany.
"We are on target," announced the bombardier, his voice made crackly by the intercom. Whitlock could imagine him hunched over the Norden bombsight in the nose of the aircraft. "Bombs away!"
The bomber's payload dropped, whistling toward the earth far below. A single pound of high explosive contained enough energy to turn an object the size of a pickup truck into scrap metal. By comparison, each bomb carried by Lucky Girl contained up to 500 pounds of high explosive, enough to level a factory — and then some. The squadron had just dropped several dozen such bombs.
Whitlock tried not to think too much about the people far below. They were only bombing military targets, but that definition had become broader with each passing month. These were not the front lines. There were schools, churches, and homes down there. Death from above did not always discriminate. And Whitlock was the courier.
Far below, they watched the impact of the bombs pucker the German landscape.
With the bombs dropped, it was now Whitlock's job as pilot to get them home. In a long, graceful maneuver in the thin air, the squadron turned together, and started back.
They flew through another curtain of flak. Hot metal splinters raked the air.
The co-pilot leaned forward, peering into the sky ahead. The lumpy patches of cloud provided good cover for enemy fighters waiting to pounce.
Whitlock gave his co-pilot a nervous sideways look. They all knew that the Luftwaffe was down, but not out. Even at this late stage of the war, the enemy managed to scramble a few fighters.
“You see something?” Whitlock asked.
“Nah, there’s nothing.” Then Bronson bolted in his chair. “Wait! We’ve got a bandit at three o'clock!"
“I see him!”
“What the hell?” Bronson’s voice was shrill. “That guy came out of nowhere!”
Whitlock shouted a warning over the intercom, but it was too late. The Messerschmitt gave them a good raking before they could get off a shot or take any defensive measures.
The big holes in the thin aluminum skin appeared almost instantly, where there had been metal before. The 20 mm cannons of the German fighter had taken a big bite out of them. In places, Lucky Girl’s fuselage now resembled a colander. He looked over at Bronson, who was slumped in his chair, head lolling on his chest. He reached over to help the unconscious co-pilot, then saw the gaping wound in his neck. Jesus. He's a goner.
"Bronson's been hit," Whitlock announced over the intercom. "Everybody else OK? Stay awake back there. You know that bandit is going to come around again."
"How bad is Bronson?" the bombardier asked. "You need some help up there?"
"He's dead," Whitlock said flatly. He was too shocked by Bronson's death for it to even register. And there would be no time for it to sink in. He looked out the cockpit window at the rapidly approaching German fighter. "Here he comes again!"
The German made a second pass. This time, the crew of Lucky Girl was ready and opened fire with everything they had. The German plane flashed past, seemingly unharmed. Lucky Girl hadn't gotten off nearly so easy. Smoke began pouring from one of the port engines, smearing the sky with a greasy black stain. Seconds later, bright orange flames licked at the wing.
Through the intercom, he could hear shouts of panic and alarm. Had anyone else been hit? He glanced out the window to his left. The engine was now engulfed in flames. Reluctantly, he gave the order to abandon the aircraft.
"We are on fire," Whitlock said into the intercom. He dispensed with any sort of formal orders. "Everybody out!"
The crew was well drilled in the procedure, but drills were one thing, and reality was another. In a drill, there was no smell of blood and leaking fuel, no crackle of flames or whistle of cold air through the bullet holes in the fuselage. As the pilot, Whitlock would be the last to leave, much as the captain was the last one to abandon a sinking ship. Whitlock wrestled with the controls, trying to keep the plane steady so that the others could evacuate. His stomach lurched as the plane dropped altitude at a sickening pace.
The bombardier and navigator exited through the bomb bay area. The two waist gunners and tail gunner had an escape hatch at the rear of the plane. It would take the ball turret gunner some time to extricate himself from the transparent globe suspended from the belly of the plane. One by one, parachutes bloomed. Whitlock kept count. When he got to eight, meaning that the other crew had evacuated, he unbuckled his safety belt and made his way to the hatch.
He paused for a moment and looked around at the aircraft, which shuddered now as she began to go into her death throes. Goodbye, Lucky Girl. It felt like he was abandoning a living, breathing creature instead of a fragile structure of metal supports and aluminum skin.
Below him, the German countryside reminded him of a green, checkered tablecloth that his mother used to bring on picnics. He gulped, not really wanting to jump. It was a long, long way down, and while he had practiced parachuting, he had never actually jumped.
The plane shivered, and snapped him back to reality. There really wasn't any other choice.
He leaped.
One of the most dangerous moments in parachuting was getting past the tail structure, which could club a man fatally. Whitlock spun, free falling, and then he was relieved to hear the sound of the chute opening above him. Almost instantaneously, he felt the sharp tug of the parachute itself.
Beneath his dangling feet, he could see enemy territory rushing up at him.
Whitlock found that descending by parachute was both thrilling and terrifying. On the one hand, Whitlock felt glad to have made it out of the doomed plane. He could see it breaking up, leaving a trail of smoke and flame across the blue sky. Other chutes floated down in the distance. Below him, he felt a sense of awe while watching the patchwork quilt of fields getting larger, and then there was a particular field below him.
His heart hammered in his chest because he seemed to be coming in too fast. He hit the ground and rolled, just as he had been trained to do. A few moments later he was back on his feet, assessing how he felt. Aside from a twinge in his ankle, he seemed to have landed unscathed.
He looked around. The sky was devoid of planes or parachutes. He had no idea where the other Lucky Girl crew members had landed.
Now he was totally alone in enemy territory. He had landed in Germany. That thought overwhelmed his sense of relief at being back on the ground.
Unfortunately for Whitlock, his descent had not gone unnoticed. As he wrestled with the chute, trying to get out of the harness, he saw a truck with bluish-gray paint drive up at the edge of the field. Three figures started running toward him. Soldiers.
Whitlock looked around him. The field was large, and there was absolutely no cover. He was having a hard time getting out of the harness. By the time he did, the soldiers were close enough that he could make out the details of their faces under the square helmets. Damn, but two of them were fast. He soon saw why. The quick soldiers were just teenagers, skinny and rangy. The third soldier, who was running more slowly, bringing up the rear, was practically an old man, closer to sixty than forty. The trio was some sort of home guard, then, not regular Wehrmacht. That did not change the fact that all three had rifles. Pointing at him.
When he raised his arms in surrender, he realized that he was shaking.