The Girl in the Blue Beret

24.



IT WAS A TENSE MISSION, BUT MARSHALL WAS GEARED UP FOR IT. Rocking and swaying, he rode the rolling air as the formation of nearly a thousand fully loaded heavy bombers clawed their way to Frankfurt. The Dirty Lily behaved herself. The formation was so huge—a great dragon, a sky serpent, miles and miles long—that no single bomber was in much danger. Enemy fighters could maul a squadron far in front or far behind, they could blast the guts out of bomber after bomber, but your own squadron might sail along undisturbed.

With all their guns, B-17s truly were flying fortresses, Marshall believed then. He remembered the strangeness of flying with stacked bombs at his back and gunners all around—pickets on duty, manning the ramparts. The pilots sat high in the cockpit like kings on thrones, commanding their airborne castles.

As the Dirty Lily advanced into Germany, a swarm of Messerschmitts appeared in the distance. They whipped through a high squadron far ahead. Marshall could see the winking lights of machine-gun fire.

An Me-109 came closer, diving toward a nearby squadron.

“Bandit at two o’clock,” the right waist gunner called to the crew. Hootie’s tone was as nonchalant as if he were offering a passing hello to a ground crewman.

Now other crewmen got on the inter-phone.

“Where’s our escort?”

“They’re coming.”

“We need P-51s,” Webb said.

Marshall didn’t see any friendlies.

As usual, the chatter was nervous, self-mocking, and incoherent. Webb had never succeeded in imposing discipline.

“Uh-oh.”

“Adjust, adjust.”

“No, we’re clear.”

Marshall was imagining what he would write to Loretta. The enemy fighter was like a devilish insect tormenting a cow in a herd. Up close, the interceptors were more like vampire bats. No, not that at all.

“Can you see, can you see?”

“Oh, say can you see.”

“There’s more of them—”

“There’s a Mustang—a little friend!”

“That one’s ours all right.”

“This is tight.… Hold on.”

“Stop it, guys,” Webb said. “Pipe down.”

An Me-109 was spiraling, aflame. The sky ahead was chaotic, with tracers and shell bursts scratching the blue like an electrical storm. Strange colors and breezes whirled aloft. It was not real. It was a show. We know what we’re doing, Marshall thought.

He had been such a smart-aleck, he thought now.

Several Me-109s were tagging one of the planes ahead. Webb was jiggling and shimmying, to spoil the fighters’ aim, although they weren’t shooting yet. Some were getting closer, but nothing to worry about yet. In the Dirty Lily’s nose compartment, the bombardier and the navigator were working their guns. In the rear, machine guns hammered sporadically. The plane shook with the recoil. Marshall vibrated in his seat, which he had reinforced with a piece of metal from the repair post.

Then the fighters melted away. The squadron was approaching the target—the grid of factory buildings, the roadways the crew had been told to expect.

“She’s yours, bombardier,” Webb called to Al Grainger. Webb eased back from the yoke.

The flak guns down below opened up. Batteries of 88s filled the sky with exploding fragmentation shells—great puffs of greasy black smoke with crimson fire in the center, bursts of lethal metal splinters whistling through the air. The agitation from the shells whipped up the already tempestuous sky, but the Dirty Lily bored straight ahead through the black blotches, held steady by the bombardier. This was anus-puckering time. The flak seemed close enough to touch. Jerry flak was accurate, as flak went.

Marshall pictured Al Grainger leaning over his bombsight and gently maneuvering the Dirty Lily with slight twists of his control knobs. The pilots could only sit and wait. There were no atheists on a bomb run, Grainger always said.

When the bomb-bay doors opened, a rush of freezing air blasted the crew.

“Shut the door!” Marshall called, as usual, waiting for Grainger to toggle the bomb switch. Sweating out the bomb run seemed to take hours.

Grainger called, “Bombs away!” and the Dirty Lily lifted, suddenly lighter and buoyant. Webb instantly grabbed the controls again. The front of the formation was bending back. The huge dragon was slowly wheeling around to begin tearing and pawing its way homeward. The sky was graying, but the weather would hold. They could see below them tracer smoke and then the multicolored smoke blooms from the falling bombs.

There was more flak. Marshall heard bits of it hitting the fuselage. It was raining metal.

Then the plane jerked. Something heavier had hit them. It didn’t register for a moment. Marshall saw smoke puff from the #4 engine. The engine began to sputter.

“Shut down number four!” Webb commanded. “Feather the prop!”

Marshall yanked the throttle and punched the feather button as quickly as he could.

“Done,” he said.

Underpowered, the Dirty Lily was sluggish again, and they were unable to keep up with the other Forts. The drag on the starboard wing was severe. Losing speed, she was dropping from formation. Marshall struggled to trim the plane, while Webb pushed the yoke forward and descended. They needed to get away from the action, where they wouldn’t be noticed. They hoped the Dirty Lily’s olive-and-gray camouflage paint would make them inconspicuous. Alone, a straggler, she would be easy prey.

“We can get back on three engines,” Webb said, stating the obvious.

Webb was too calm, Marshall thought. That was because this wasn’t really happening.

Marshall didn’t know what had hit them. Probably flak. But maybe it was a chunk of metal blown off a Fort. The sky was a pandemonium of random debris, shells and fragments, ragged junk, pieces of airplanes.

This wasn’t what he had imagined back in flight school. This was all wrong.


WHEN THEY WERE LOW enough to doff their oxygen masks, Webb sent Marshall back to the waist to inspect for damage. The waist gunners were scanning the skies through their open windows. Marshall noted some flak rips in the plane’s skin, but nothing serious—a few punctures, a couple of jagged metal bits of flak underfoot. The fuselage was cramped, crew jammed together ass to elbow. But the light coming through the windows was dazzling.

Then, as Marshall turned back toward the cockpit, the light flickered. A wisp of cloud washed past. Then another. Marshall hurried forward. Through the cockpit windows he saw a lovely drift of whiteness in front of them. Clouds. Webb burrowed into the mass. The lighting dimmed. They were inside a soft gray haze, concealed from sight.

“Thank God,” Webb said, as Marshall slid into his seat. “If this cloud-bank goes far enough.…”

He didn’t need to say more. If they could work their way west hidden within clouds, Jerry wouldn’t spot them.

They flew on, steady and cold and watchful. They alternated. Webb flew for a while, then handed off to Marshall. From time to time, they dipped below the clouds so the navigator could get a peek at the ground, to correct his position coordinates. The crew was grim and silent. Marshall refused to believe they might not reach base. The trip home should be simple now, a steady push into the west. Slow, maybe, but they would get there. They were having steak and ice cream at mess that night, rare treats.

“Webb, I need you to drop below again.” It was Campanello, the navigator.

“Roger.”

Webb took the controls from Marshall and eased back the throttles. The plane sank gracefully toward brightness below. She floated downward into the clear. Marshall was counting the seconds till they could climb again.

They depended on Campanello to guide them home. On the way over, there was no need to navigate. They had played follow-the-leader, the sky full of Forts all going in the same direction, and Campanello could take it easy. But now, with his compass, ruler, and a pencil, and only a few glimpses at the world below, he had to take them home by dead reckoning.

Lily lifted up into the clouds again.


THEY HAD BEEN FLYING more than an hour, disbelief masking dread. They were still swaddled in clouds when a Focke-Wulf 190 suddenly appeared alongside Marshall’s starboard window, materializing out of the gray mist. Marshall and the German pilot spotted each other at the same moment, and each froze. The Jerry’s leather helmet was pushed back, exposing a patch of bright blond hair. Then the FW-190 flipped and vanished.

“Bandit starboard!” Marshall yelled on the inter-phone just as he heard the guns open up.

“Where did that come from?”

“Did you see that guy?”

“Let’s get the hell home,” Webb said, muttering half to himself, half to Marshall.

How did the 190 find them? He would circle back, if he could. Marshall called to the gunners, “Don’t blink!”

It must have been sheer, lousy chance, he thought. Fighters were looking for them, but the chance of finding them in the clouds was one in a million. And finding them again, unlikely.

But the FW would alert others. More German fighters would be looking for them now. A straggler. A defenseless Yank.

“Those big Fritzes get ambitious when Goering threatens to send them to the Russian front,” Marshall said. “He promised them an Iron Cross for every Fort.”

They flew on, Webb maneuvering only a little, a slight zigzag in the clouds. There was a nervous babble on the inter-phone for a while, but it died down.

The silence of the inter-phone then was like the crew holding its breath. When Marshall wasn’t scanning the cloud-clogged skies, he steadied himself by methodically reviewing the compass, the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, making a constant inventory of the instruments. Could we speed up? Could we trim better?

Webb, exhausted, handed off to Marshall while he wrote up the data in his log. They seemed to be flying in slow motion. It was eerie, timeless. They pushed through the enveloping grayness, at times seeming not to move at all. Marshall’s eyes were stinging. He had to remind himself to blink. He had hardly noticed when they came down out of the sub-zero cold.

Slowly they groped their way, fighting the yoke and rudder pedals, trying to pile up the miles behind them. An hour of this. Or was it a day? Or a week?

The hands of the chronometer crept ahead but didn’t seem to have any meaning. The Dirty Lily skulked through the grog. They were slinking toward home.

We won’t die, Marshall said to himself. We might not die.

Then the clouds began breaking up. Damn. Adrenaline pulsed higher. The vapor around them thinned, broke apart, and gradually evaporated. They were in the open.

It must be Belgium down there, unless they had angled down over France. No sign of the Channel, unless it was the blue haze on the horizon.

Farmland, a river, a village—a mile or so below. Marshall could make out a stone church. More villages and fields.

Campanello was calling through the inter-phone the name of the river below when a Jerry fighter bore in on them from dead ahead. Grainger yelled out, “Attack! Attack! Twelve o’clock level.”

—Grainger was shooting.

—The plane jolted.

—The Plexiglas nose cone shattered.

—Bullets smacked the back of the pilots’ control panel.

—Top turret opened up, then the waist gunners.

—The FW raced under them and was gone.

Wind screamed through the opened fuselage, and the Dirty Lily bucketed and shuddered. Marshall and Webb both grabbed their yokes, fighting a plane almost out of control. Their air speed was dropping dangerously.

Webb motioned downward. He and Marshall both pushed forward on their yokes. The crippled plane nosed down.

The top turret gunner called, “I think I got him!”

Tail gunner: “No, you didn’t.”

“Al’s hit!” Campanello yelled. His voice was thin and distant in Marshall’s headset. “Shoulder. And me. My leg.”

Webb yanked the yoke to the right. They pulled through a diving turn, then hauled back. Straining, muscling, Webb and Marshall leveled the bomber at about five hundred feet, maybe less.

“Bandit, ten o’clock high!” Top turret.

The guns were hammering again.

The FW—silver with red markings—raked their port side, nose to tail.

Hadley, the radio man, called out something that sounded like “running board.”

Chick Cochran was on the inter-phone from the waist. “We’ve got a fire back here!”

“Bail out, bail out!” cried Webb.

“No!” Marshall cried. “Too low!”

Webb leaned back and reached for his chute pack. Marshall clung to the yoke.

Marshall called to the crew, “I’m bringing it in.”

Marshall said to Webb, “It’s my airplane.”

He saw fields next to a village. He was going straight in. He yelled on the inter-phone for the ball-turret gunner to crawl out.

They crested a line of trees, then sank toward the dirt. As the plane skidded onto the field, the props ripping the ground, Marshall saw Webb slumped, head resting on his chest as if he had just nodded off for a quick snooze.