A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (27 page)

Just as the head mechanic, Shack, had warned him, Charlie saw engine four running rough, the needles wobbling in the oil and manifold pressure gauges. Charlie looked past Pinky and along the right wing, where engine four sat at the far end. As if Charlie had caught it misbehaving, the engine settled into a rhythm under his watchful glare. Charlie throttled up the RPMs on the engines, one at a time, the prop blast flattening the grass behind the bomber’s tail. Satisfied, he backed off on the throttle. Looking at the other clovers around the field, Charlie could barely see the bombers’ outlines in the partial darkness and floating smoke. Their engines’ exhaust flames burned blue.

As the throbbing plane warmed up, Charlie silently prayed or, as he referred to it, conducted a “short briefing with my Third Pilot.” Beneath the layers of his life vest and parachute harnesses he patted the chest pocket of his leather jacket, assuring himself that his Bible was still there. Charlie was a Methodist, and just as he had never missed a day of school, he never missed a Sunday service. “God’s on our side, right, Pinky?” Charlie asked.

“He better be,” Pinky replied.

Bombers began taxiing past, so Charlie opened his window and motioned for the ground crewmen to slip away the wheel chocks so his bomber could move. Walt’s bomber rolled from the clover and merged onto the taxiway behind the others. After the other bomber from the clover squeaked past
The Pub
, Pinky released the brakes and the bomber’s bulging tires turned forward. With each start and squealing stop, the smell of gasoline and exhaust filled the cockpit.

Turning the plane onto the taxiway, Charlie saw endless upright tails ahead, each rudder waving the group’s mark, a black K inside a white triangle. He glanced out his side window and saw the bomber’s wings draped over the narrow taxiway. Because
The Pub
had been
slotted for Purple Heart Corner, Charlie found himself twentieth in line to take off, one position away from last in line. Preston’s bomber swung onto the runway and set itself for launch.

From the top rail of the control tower, the operations officer studied his wristwatch, while around him the group’s staff watched the impressive panorama of twenty-one B-17s snaking around the heart-shaped field. Officers scrambled up the stairs to the control tower, their ears telling them they had not yet missed the big show.

When the operations officer’s watch clicked to 7:30
A.M.
, he raised a flare gun and fired one green flare and then another. Charlie saw the flares arc through the fog. That was the signal to take off, a silent message because the Germans were monitoring the radio channels.

Preston’s bomber lurched forward. It rolled, then barreled, then blasted down the runway before lifting up from the concrete with a wing wobble from the plane’s weight. Thirty seconds passed before the next bomber launched. Thirty seconds later another followed. Then another. Then another. Bombers named
London Avenger
,
The Old Fox
,
Judy
, and
Damdifino
.

Ten minutes later, it was
The Pub
’s turn. Charlie pushed all four throttles forward. The bomber vibrated, fighting her brakes. She shook like a jackhammer from nose to tail, wanting to run. Pinky kept his eyes on his watch. He raised his hand. When thirty seconds had passed, he dropped his hand. Charlie lifted his feet from the brakes and let the bomber loose. With a roar she tilted her nose slowly downward as she ran.

Charlie felt the vibrations from the wings course through the ribs of the fuselage and through his seat. He had never flown a bomber so heavy or felt the runway so rough through his foot pedals. The engines roared louder. The props bit the air. Charlie knew that when he pulled back on the yoke, the lives of nine men would be in his hands.

The Pub
raced past the fields and past the fire truck and ambulance that waited halfway down the strip. When the bomber’s nose broke one hundred miles per hour, Charlie slowly pulled the control
column toward his chest, until an invisible gust of air rushed beneath the wings and broke the suction of the earth, lifting the bomber into the sky. In an instant, Charlie felt the machine calm from vibrating to humming. With the bomber’s propeller blades clawing for altitude, Charlie tapped the brakes to clench the wheels and stop their spinning. A glimpse out his window revealed the balloon tires were unmoving.

“Gear up,” he ordered.

Pinky toggled the gear up, right side first, then left. The voice of one of the waist gunners crackled over the radio, “Tail wheel, up.” Charlie swore he could feel his gunners’ footsteps through the controls as they left their takeoff positions in the radio room to man their stations. Charlie banked into a gentle turn to follow the plane ahead of him. By 7:45
A.M.
the quietness of a winter’s morning had again descended on the base.

A
BOVE
K
IMBOLTON, THE
bombers of the 379th corkscrewed upward through dark clouds. Their plane blanketed in the haze, Charlie and Pinky gripped the control yokes tightly, although only Charlie steered. Pinky kept an eye out for the tail guns of the bomber in front of him. Charlie focused on his instruments, flying by blind faith. He feared ascents like this, the perfect setup for a midair collision.

From twenty-three bases across the breadth of England, nearly 475 bombers climbed through the clouds. Making matters more harrowing, as part of the “Round the Clock” strategy, the Americans were going out at the same time the British bombers were coming home from their night raids.
It’s a sky full of terror
, Charlie thought.

Through a cloud, Charlie saw the bomber ahead of him appear briefly then disappear. The mist around his canopy parted, and
The Pub
popped into the clear air at eight thousand feet. Above him, Charlie saw the planes of the 379th spiraling upward. They seemed to fly around an invisible pole. Glancing across England, Charlie saw other
bomb groups popping from the cloud’s orange roofs, leaving purple holes in their wakes.

From one end of the sky to another, the bombers’ radiomen fired flares from their rooftop hatches, signaling the groups to assemble into combat boxes. Colonel Preston flew onward, straight and steady, trusting everyone to follow him. In a B-17 there was no rearview mirror, just the tail gunner’s voice.

As the 379th bombers slid into formation, the 303rd and 384th bomb groups latched on behind them. Together, the three groups comprised the wing that would lead the other wings of the 8th Air Force. In the lead, Preston steered gently to avoid a column of magnificent clouds. Slowly, the other wings fell into formation behind Preston’s, forming a stream of bombers. From the forefront, Charlie looked out his side window during the turn. Behind him, he saw the long string of nearly five hundred bombers, which made him smile in awe.

At the tip of the spear, Preston’s navigator set a new course as the flock of bombers turned toward Germany.

Climbing steadily through twelve thousand feet, Charlie and his crew donned their oxygen masks. A little rubber bag like a tiny lung dangled from each man’s mask. The lung expanded and contracted with each breath. Charlie addressed the crew and ordered an oxygen check. Each man wore a throat mic, and to talk, all he needed to do was squeeze a button on a clicker that was wired to a wall outlet. One by one the crew checked in, each confirming that his mask was working. If flak severed a man’s oxygen line, he would become sleepy and drunk before he passed out from “anoxia,” as it was known. Charlie had heard stories that more than a few gunners had bailed out of perfectly good planes, drunk with anoxia. Waist gunners under anoxia were once found singing and toasting each other in the back of the plane, thinking they were already at the bar.

At twenty thousand feet, Charlie plugged his heated suit into the outlet by his left thigh and ordered his men to plug in as well. The
frost on his window told Charlie that the temperature outside had plummeted far below freezing. He piped over the intercom a reminder for the men to keep their gloves on. The aluminum that separated them from the open sky was only a few centimeters thick and so cold that if they touched the metal with bare skin, they would stick.

Passing through twenty-four thousand feet, the stream of bombers crossed over the English coastline above the city of Great Yarmouth and departed friendly territory. Charlie felt a sinking feeling in his gut when he realized that the freezing North Sea lay below his feet.

Charlie told the gunners they were free to test their weapons. Charlie heard the burst of their .50-calibers from over his shoulder as the noise traveled up the centerline of the bomber and into the cockpit. He knew that behind them, his men were firing with vigor toward the sea, a cathartic outpouring of angst. He smelled the acrid odor of gun smoke when Doc and Andy fired from the nose.

“Permission to arm the bombs?” Andy asked from the nose.

“Granted,” Charlie replied.

Andy carried a yellow portable oxygen tank back to the narrow catwalk and crossed the bomb bay like a tightrope walker. Delicately he pulled the arming pins and brought the bombs to life. After returning to the nose, he reported to Charlie, “Bombs armed.”

Ye Olde Pub
was off to war.

*
Preston would remember, “I enjoyed in WWII the biggest success I have had in my day, in my time, in my life. One always enjoys what he is successful at.”
³

*
Eighth Air Force historians Philip Kaplan and Rex Smith would describe precision daylight bombing with this comparison: “Consider that trying to drop bombs into a 2,000-foot circle while speeding past at an altitude of 25,000 feet in a bomber under fire was much like trying to drop grains of rice into a teacup while riding past on a bicycle.”
⁴

THREE AND A HALF HOURS LATER, 11 A.M., HIGH OVER THE NORTH SEA

E
VER SINCE TAKEOFF
, bombers all around Charlie had been turning home for mechanical reasons. Three of the seven planes in his flight had departed, an unusually high number considering that a 10 percent abort rate was normal. Charlie’s flight leader, Walt, got on his radio. “Goldsmith two-zero,” he said, using Charlie’s call signal. “Close up on my left wing.”

Charlie eased the bomber into her new slot tight to Walt’s plane. Together, they glided at twenty-seven thousand feet above the icy sea.

A white fleck fell onto the brown sleeve of Charlie’s jacket. Then another fell and another. He risked a glance upward. Frost had formed and spread across the ceiling. The moisture that had been in the plane on the ground had now risen. He ran his gloved hand across the ceiling. White flakes cascaded like snow inside the cockpit. “Well how about that,” he said with awe.

“It’s going to be a white Christmas after all,” Pinky joked, smiling behind his mask.

Charlie chuckled. He knew Pinky and the crew had been looking forward to the Christmas party that the group would be hosting for the children of Kimbolton Village the next day. Despite his hangdog demeanor, Ecky was actually looking forward to Christmas the most. All the chocolate bars he’d been scrounging and hoarding weren’t actually for him. Blackie had told Charlie that Ecky had been saving the chocolate rations for weeks, wrapping them up as presents for the kids at the party. Christmas itself was on a Saturday, just four days distant.