War and Remembrance (94 page)

But when she offered to go to Washington and write some stories on the war effort there, he brightened. “Well, why not? Do try your hand, Pam. We know you were drafting Talky’s copy toward the last. When will you let us have ‘Sunset on Kidney Ridge’? We’re frightfully anxious for it.”

Slote knew of two Foreign Service officers who had disappeared on ferry command bomber flights between Scotland and Montreal. The North Atlantic sky was not the route of choice, certainly not in midwinter. Big comfortable airliners flew the southern route — down to Dakar, a hop across sunny seas to the bulge of Brazil, then north to Bermuda and so on to Baltimore. But that was for big shots. The choices offered him were a ten-day voyage in a convoy, or an RAF ferry command trip.

On the train to the Scottish airport, he fell in with an American ferry pilot going the same way: a wiry middle-sized Army Air Corps captain with a toothbrush mustache, a wild eye, three banks of ribbons on his khaki tunic, a richly obscene vocabulary, and a great store of flying stories. The two men had a compartment to themselves. The ferry pilot kept nipping brandy, explaining that he was getting plastered and intended to stay plastered until they were well off the Prestwick runway. Crashing on takeoff was a hazard at Prestwick. He had attended two mass funerals of pilots who had died on the runway. Dangerous overloads of gasoline had to be accepted, when you were flying westward into North Atlantic gales. The ferry command had to keep hauling pilots back, because shipping disassembled aircraft by sea was slow and cumbersome, and the U-boats got too many of them. It was the ferry pilots who were really building up the Allied air forces in the war zones. Nobody gave a shit about them, but they were the key to the whole war.

As the old dusty train clanked its slow way through snowy fields, the pilot regaled Slote with his autobiography. His name was Bill Fenton. A barnstormer before the war, he had since 1937 been doing various flying jobs, civilian and military, for various governments. He had flown cargo carriers on the India-China run (“over the hump,” he called it); taking off from a runway that had to be cleared of cows and water buffalo by a honking jeep, then climbing five miles and more to get over icy storms that whirled higher than Everest. He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to ferry planes to England. Now he was flying bombers for the Army Air Corps via South America to Africa, and on across to Persia and the Soviet Union. He had crash-landed in the desert. He had floated for two days in the Irish Sea on a rubber raft. He had parachuted into Japanese-held territory in Burma, and walked out to India on foot.

By the time they reached Prestwick in a snowstorm, Slote was not only tired, sleepy, and drunk from his share of Bill Fenton’s brandy; he had a whole new vision of the war. In his fumed brain pictures reeled of aircraft crisscrossing the globe — bombers, fighters, transports, by the thousands — battling the weather and the enemy, bombing cities, railroads, and troop columns; crossing oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges; a war such as Thucydides had never imagined, filling the skies of the planet with hurtling machines manned by hordes of Bill Fentons. He had not until now given the war in the air a thought. For once, the everlasting Wannsee Protocol, the map of Poland with the three black circles, and the European trains carrying hundreds of thousands of Jews each month to their deaths faded from his mind. He was moreover so scared at the prospect of the flight that he could hardly walk off the train.

When they arrived at the airfield the plane was warming up. Waddling out of the check-in office in cumbersome flying suits, heavy gloves, and life vests, with parachutes dangling behind their knees, they could not at first
see the aircraft through the falling snow. Fenton led him toward the motor sound. It was inconceivable to Leslie Slote that a machine could take off in this weather. Inside the four-engine bomber there were rio seats. On the board floor about a dozen returning ferry pilots sprawled on pallets. Slote’s armpits coldly dripped and his heart raced as the plane heavily took off. Fenton screamed into his ears, over the engine roar and the groan of retracting wheels, that the weather briefing predicted headwinds of a hundred miles an hour. They might well have to put down in Greenland, the asshole of the Arctic.

Leslie Slote was a coward. He knew it. He had given up fighting it. Even riding in a car with a fast driver gave him bad nerves. Every airplane ride, just a one-hour hop in a DC-3, was an ordeal. This man now found himself in a stripped-down four-engine bomber, setting out to cross the Atlantic westward in December; a howling rattletrap that sucked in the cold through whining and whistling air leaks, climbed through hail that made a machine gun racket on the fuselage, and bucked, dipped, and swerved like a kite. Slote could see, in dim light from iced-up windows, the greenish faces of the sprawled pilots, the sweat-beaded foreheads, the shaking hands bringing cigarettes or bottles to tight mouths. The fliers looked fully as terrified as he felt.

Fenton had explained on the train that the North Atlantic head winds were strongest at low altitudes. Planes flew high to climb over the weather and conserve fuel in the thinner air; but up there they could accumulate ice too fast for the de-icers to work. Also, the carburetors could get chilled from pulling in subzero air, and they could ice up. Then the engines would quit. That no doubt was the way so many planes vanished. When ice began to build up you could keep trying to climb above the wet cold into the dry cold, where one needed an oxygen mask to survive. Otherwise you had to drop back down fast, maybe down to the wave tops, where warmer air would melt your ice. Against his better judgment, Slote had asked him, “Can’t the icing conditions prevail right down to the water?”

“Hell, yes,” Fenton had answered. “Let me tell you what happened to me.” And he had launched into a long hideous anecdote about a near-spin into the water off Newfoundland under a heavy ice load.

The plane kept climbing and climbing; loose things persisted in sliding toward the rear. Some pilots huddled under ragged blankets and snored. Fenton too stretched out and closed his eyes. A sudden metallic crashing and banging along the fuselage stopped Slote’s heart, or so he felt. Fenton blinked, grinned at Slote, and pantomimed ice forming along the wings, and rubber de-icers cracking it off.

Slote wondered how anybody could sleep in this howling torture chamber in the sky, hammered at by breaking ice. He could as soon sleep, he
thought, nailed to a cross. His nose was freezing. There was no sensation in his hands or feet. Yet he did doze, for a nasty sensation woke him: a smell of rubber, a cold thing pressed to his face as in anesthesia. He opened his eyes in the dark. Fenton’s voice yelled in his ear, “Oxygen.” Somebody lit a dim battery lamp. A shadowy figure was stumbling here and there with masks that trailed long rubber tubes. Slote thought he had never been so cold, so numb, so sick all over, so ready to die and get it over with.

All at once the plane dived, roaring. The pilots sat up and looked about with white-rimmed eyes. It was an obscure comfort in Slote’s agony that these skilled men were so scared, too. After a horrendously steep long dive, ice crashed along the fuselage once more. The floor levelled off.

“Never make Newfoundland,” Fenton yelled in Slote’s ear. “Greenland it is.”

Ven Der Fuehrer says,

“Ve iss der Master Race,”

Ve Heil (phfft!)

Heil (phfft!)

Right in Der Fuehrer’s face.

In the wooden barracks beside the Greenland runway, this song was grinding out of the phonograph, hour after hour. It was the only record on hand. The airfield, a treeless spread of steel netting sunk into mud and drifted over with snow, was a drearier place than Slote had imagined could exist on earth. The runway was short and chancy, so the refueled aircraft had to wait for endurable takeoff conditions.

Not to luff Der Fuehrer

Iss a great disgrace

So ve Heil (phfft!)

Heil (phfft!)

Right in Der Fuehrer’s face.

Here in this witless ditty, Slote thought, was the fatally soft American idea of Hitler and the Nazis — the ranting boob, the dumbbell followers, the
heils
and the razzes. The musical arrangement mixed various funny noises — cowbells, toy trumpets, tin cans — with the oom-pahs of a German band. The pilots were playing cards or lolling about, and when the record ended somebody simply moved the needle back to the start.

Fenton lay on the bunk underneath Slote’s, leafing a girlie magazine. Slote leaned over and asked him what he thought of “Der Fuehrer’s Face.”
Fenton yawned that it was getting to be a pain in the ass. Climbing down, Slote sat beside the captain and unburdened himself about the massacre of the Jews, bitterly observing that when a song like that could amuse people, it was small wonder that nobody believed what was happening.

Turning the pages of naked females, Bill Fenton calmly remarked, “Shit, man, who doesn’t believe it?
I
believe it. Those Germans have to be weird people, to follow a nut like Hitler. Some of them are fine aviators, but taken as a nation they’re a menace.”

Ven Herr Goebbels says,

“Ve own de Vorld and Space,”

Ve Heil (phfft!)

Heil (phfft!)

Right in Herr Goebbels’ face.

Ven Herr Goering says,

“Dey’ll neffer bomb dis place,”

Ve Heil (phfft!)

Heil (phfft!)

Right in Herr Goering s face
…

“But what can anybody do about the Jews?” Fenton tossed the magazine aside, stretching and yawning. “Fifty million people will die before this war’s over. The Japs have been fighting the Chinese since 1937. Do you know how many Chinese have starved to death? Nobody does. Maybe ten million. Maybe more. You ever been to India? There’s a powder keg. The British can’t keep the lid on much longer. When India blows, you’re going to see Hindus and Sikhs and Moslems and Buddhists and Parsees cutting each other’s throats till hell won’t have it. The Germans have killed a lot more Russians than Jews. This world is a slaughterhouse, man, it always has been, and that’s what all these fucking pacifists keep forgetting.”

Iss ve not der Supermen?

Aryan pure, Supermen?

Yah! ve iss der Supermen

Sooper DOOPER Supermen!

Fenton enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and he was getting worked up. He sat erect and poked Slote on the shoulder. “Tell me this. Is Stalin any better than Hitler? I say he’s the same kind of murderer. Yet we’re flying half of the bombers we’re producing over to him — free, gratis, and for nothing, and some damn good pilots are getting killed at it, and I’m risking my own ass. And why? Because he’s
our
murderer, that’s why. We’re not
doing it for humanity, or for Russia, or for anything except to save our own asses. Christ,
I
feel sorry for the Jews, don’t think I don’t, but there just isn’t a thing we can do about them but beat the shit out of the Germans.”

So ve Heil(phfft!)

Heil(phfft!)

Right
…
in
…
Der
…
Fuehrers
…
face.