THROUGH A PILOT'S WINDOW

I heard a rumble behind me, then a roar of air. The bomb bay doors had rolled open. I turned in my seat to check them. Now we swung on the speck that was our freighter. “On course!” came over the interphone from the bombardier. Ed answered, “Level!” A stick of five bombs left the lead ship. I concentrated on our own bomb-release signal. It should flicker now -- no -- now! What in hell was the matter? Just as the Major swung into a 90-degree turn, our ship jumped. The bombs were gone! The electric releases must have frozen, and now the bombardier had salvoed. Some spot of open water would be broiled up. I whipped a glance at Ed’s face. That was all I needed: I wondered how much it would take for a man to explode at 24,000 feet – and what a mess it would be for the co-pilot to work through! I was too mad to talk, but Ed was trying, and the words that spouted from his red face into the green oxygen mask fairly blew the mask off his face. The garbled mess the throat microphone allowed to boil into the interphone must have thawed out those rear gunners! Now the two right motors dropped earthward in a wingover as we held our place in formation. We twisted and dived for three thousand feet to avoid the black puffs now spouting around us. We shallowed our descent and started on our route home. As we turned again, I could see smoke coming from the freighter, and there had been other hits on the mole. Now there was a trail of smoke and an occasional flame from up the mole beyond our target-- – we had hit either an oil dump or a small tanker. Ed and I exchanged glances again. His eyes wrinkled at the corners, and I knew he was grinning. So was I. We had taken Benghazi by surprise –- but as I looked, the sky around the last element was black with ack-ack bursts. The anti-aircraft was really awake! I learned later that the last element of the formation had picked up enough flak for the whole squadron. It’s interesting to watch the stuff hunt you out. First black puffs appear below or above you. Then they find your altitude and close in. If you’re still on a straight course, the harmless-looking smoke rings get closer. Suddenly part of your windshield goes past your ear, or a motor lets off a trail of black smoke. The Germans sometimes anticipated our path and prepared a box of black bursts for us to penetrate. Aside from actual damage, the sight alone bothered the bombardiers. There came a blur over the interphone – our tail gunner reported two pursuits climbing up below us. We looked around and down, but the pilots can never see anything from that little greenhouse. The rear gunners know twice as much about the result of a mission as the pilots. Suddenly, I noticed number four oil pressure was down to forty pounds, and it crept lower. Our waist gunner had reported “smoke” from number four, so we knew we’d been losing oil, but didn’t realize so much was gone. We wanted to keep all the motors until we broke up formation at dark. Just then Ed shoved the throttle ahead a bit. He’d gotten word over the inter-plane radio that the pursuits were diving out of the sun, and at the same time I felt the ship jar as Taylor in the rear turret went into action. I knew all the rear guns were at work. When your men start shooting, you tense up a bit and try to spot the fighter so you can tell how to maneuver. He comes streaming into your vision making you think your flaps are down or you’re parked. Then he skitters high ahead and wings over to come back with red spots flashing where his guns are so that his ship seems to be afire. When he comes in from ahead, the bomber pilot tightens up more than ever until he becomes hardened to the sight. The top turret was swinging to the left of the ship and I saw tracers leaving the other ships of our element. “Into a spin” and “parachute”, is what I could picked out on the interphone. The pursuits (one Me 109 and one Macchi 200) had dived out of the low sun in between the wing ships to be safe from cross fire, because the waist gunners couldn’t fire toward each other. But the tail turrets blasted when they were above and the side guns let go as they passed under. The Macchi that attacked us whipped into a spin, caught fire, and dived while the pilots bailed out. He had strafed one ship with little damage. The Me 109 had torn up one of the ships behind us a bit and shattered the knee of one of its waist gunners, but that enemy was diving in flames too. A few minutes later a report of the injury came over the radio. They had administered sulfanilamide and a half-grain of morphine and were applying a tourniquet, but the boy was cold and would the formation go to a lower altitude to lessen chances of shock? We did, and by now the sun was about down, so we dropped into the desert haze that helped cut the light. The Major finally signaled to “break it up”, and when we were spread out, we cut number four and feathered it. I looked at the three blades standing straight into the wind, and contemplated the ingenuity of man. A blue flame from inside number three cowling stopped the reverie. It spat regularly, rapidly and outward from a cylinder, hitting against the cowling, where a white disk was appearing in the metal. Now I knew what had caused my “chopping chunks of air” sound -- one spark plug had blown out. The ignition from the other plug was shooting out a torch-like flame seen in the growing darkness. I pointed it out to Ed. “Well, hell!” he said, “We’ve still got one good “fan” left!” and grinned to give me confidence. He continued balancing the ship’s controls to offset the unequal pull of the three motors. Together we set the automatic pilot. As a safety precaution, I turned the fire extinguisher on number-three engine so that I only needed to pull the handle if the engine caught fire. It was well past dinnertime -- eight o’clock -- and not much for us to do but peer into the darkness below and the star laden sky above and watch instruments. Occasionally white streaks would shoot near us out of the sky. The first one always startled us a bit, but then we knew they were just shooting stars. Sometimes they would burn out way below us. I called Swetland and asked for his can opener. He passed it up, and I opened a can of grapefruit. The can was still chilled from altitude as though it had come out of the refrigerator. One of the best watermelons I ever had was one that a gunner brought aboard and handed out on the way home -- it was chilled through and through. Chadwick came out of his turret a minute to eat, and passed out some crackers and beef sausages. This night flight home is almost the hardest part of the trip. The strain is over. There’s little chance of fighter attack. Yet if you eat, sleep is as persistent an enemy as the Jerry. You check your course with the navigator, listen to the synchronous roar of the engines, and check instruments again -- oil and cylinder-head temperature, fuel and oil pressure, r.p.m.’s, the compass, and the altitude -- and that steady, uncompromising drone in your ears wants to put you to sleep. But you don’t dare sleep. So you smoke and slouch down in your seat, or peer out for clouds or lights. Sometimes you can get a program on the radio in English from a commercial station in Cairo or Jerusalem. You pull back the window by your ear to flip the cigarette out and sniff fresh air. The sound is like the thunder of falling water at Niagara. It’s just wind, but it’s terrific. I remember teachers trying to convince me that air was substance. At air speed, it’s a solid! I checked instruments again. Number one oil pressure was fluctuating, but the trouble was probably the instrument. We had another two hours to go, but they passed safely. Once the Pleiades looked like weaving searchlights in the distance, until we finally identified them as the constellation on the horizon. I remembered another night the bulging redness of the rising moon looked like a burning ship.