CHAPTER 3

High above Germany, the B-17 Flying Fortress left behind a white contrail as if someone had dragged a piece of chalk across the slate blue sky. The plane was just one of a squadron flying in formation. At the controls of the lead bomber was Harrison Whitlock IV, a 22-year-old first lieutenant who had left Harvard University in his junior year to join the Army Air Corps.

This was his fourteenth mission with the Lucky Girl, as the crew had decided to call the plane. It had cost Whitlock twenty bucks to get a private who had been an art student at Columbia to decorate the fuselage with a portrait of a buxom young woman with flowing red hair. She wasn't based on anyone Whitlock or the other young crewmen had known outside of their fantasies, but she was just their sort of ideal girl — that is, all tits and ass and gratitude — that they wouldn't have minded coming back to at the end of a mission. They liked to joke that they would make her one Lucky Girl, all right.

Maybe it was silly to be motivated by a girl straight out of a fantasy, but 27,000 feet up with German flak coming at you, you held on to what you could.

"Smooth air so far today," said Chip Bronson, the co-pilot.

"Don't jinx us," said Whitlock, who was known for being easygoing, except when he took command of the Lucky Girl, at which time he became a hard ass. That was just fine with the nine other crew members aboard the Lucky Girl who put their faith in Whitlock to get them back home in one piece. Whitlock had done just that so far, but they were all well aware that sometimes a plane and its crew just drew the short straw when it came to luck, regardless of the girl on the fuselage.

They had seen it happen on their third mission, when the tail gunner shot a German fighter practically right out of the sky. They had all cheered on the intercom, but then watched in horror as the cartwheeling fighter slammed into another B-17. Silence had fallen as the B-17 plummeted to earth, too quickly for any parachutes to get out. Back on the ground, they never had talked about it.

"Not a bandit in sight," Bronson said.

"What did I just say about jinxing us?"

Bronson smirked, clearly busting the pilot’s chops, and they flew on in silence. Whitlock had to admit that the job had gotten a little easier over the last few weeks. The Luftwaffe was mostly gone from the skies. Earlier in the air war, that had not been the case at all, and the German fighters had devastated the B-17 bombers.

For defensive purposes, it was critical to stay in formation. The fighter escorts did not have the range of the bombers, and so had to turn back as the bombers pressed deeper and deeper into German territory as the weeks progressed. That left the B-17s unprotected from the Messerschmitt fighters. However, it wasn't for nothing that the American bombers were called Flying Fortresses. With an array of heavy machine guns, a B-17 created a defensive perimeter around itself. The Germans nicknamed the B-17s "Flying Porcupines" for good reason. There were weak points and blind spots, however, which was why it was critical to stay in position. The squadron's formation enabled the planes to cover one another, thus creating a zone of defense around their bombers.

That was the theory, anyhow, and it all sounded good in flight school. Reality was a bit different. A German Me109 moved at more than four hundred miles per hour, fired 20 mm cannon rounds that left holes the size of a softball in a bomber’s thin skin, and flew circles around the lumbering B-17. In close air combat, it tested the limits of human reflexes to be able to swivel and fire at a target moving at that speed. To be sure, it took a young man’s reflexes. Whitlock used to do some trapshooting with his grandfather, Senator Harrison Whitlock II, and it had been hard enough to hit a clay pigeon with a 12-gauge shotgun. Compared to a German fighter, a clay pigeon now seemed like a slow, lumbering target. And the clay pigeon wasn't shooting back.

It took a lot of firing, and a lot of luck, to knock a German fighter out of the sky. Fortunately, the B-17 made up for being slow by being tough. Lucky Girl could take an awful lot of abuse of the flying lead variety.

As they neared the target, bursts of flak began to claw the sky. Lucky Girl danced in the turbulence from the explosions. Whitlock tried not to think too much about what it would mean to take a direct hit. Until a few months ago, he had never heard of the word "flak," which was a British interpretation of what the Germans called Flug Abarhr Kanone—anti-aircraft ordnance. Now he was all too aware of the word. Call it whatever you wanted — by any name it was nerve-wracking as hell.

The intercom crackled, and the navigator came on to give him an update.

"Hey Cap, we're getting close."

Whitlock glanced at his own map, which was more rudimentary than the navigator's. He could see they were near the drop zone. He got the bombardier on the intercom.

"I'll hold her steady," Whitlock said. "You send the presents down the chimney."

On this plane, there were several jobs going on at once. The navigator. The bombardier. The flight engineer. The radio operator. Four separate gunners, including the Sperry ball turret gunner, provided defense. And there was a co-pilot, in case Whitlock caught a piece of that flak, or became otherwise incapacitated. His own job was to get them to the target and back in one piece.

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.

• • •

The two younger Germans looked excited about having captured an American. Wearing giddy smiles, the boys herded Whitlock toward the truck at gunpoint. It was as if they had just won a game of Capture the Flag, and he was the prize.

The older man looked grim, evidently more aware than the boys of the seriousness of the situation. He did not seem to outrank the boys, at least not by any rank visible on his uniform, but was their de facto commander due to his age. In civilian life, he could have been their schoolteacher or perhaps a successful village merchant. He had that softness about him of an indoors man, but also an air of casual authority.

The boys certainly shaped up when he barked something at them in German. The older man used his rifle to point Whitlock toward the truck, and then climbed in after him with the boys. An even older man was behind the wheel. He hadn’t bothered to get out.

They all rode together in the back of the truck. Nobody bothered to tie his hands — he was unarmed, and where could he go? These young guys had already shown that they could run like rabbits, and the older one looked like he wouldn't mind using that rifle of his. Unlike the boys, he did not appear excited, but world weary and distracted, as if he missed his classroom or his shop.

One of the young ones offered him a drink from a canteen, which Whitlock accepted gratefully. He drank and drank, having been unaware of how thirsty he was. He supposed it was fear that had turned his mouth to cotton.

He finally remembered to think of Bronson. They had waited together in the chow line this morning. Now Bronson was dead. Lucky Girl was gone. He glanced at his Timex watch and realized that from the time the German fighter had attacked until he had touched down in the field, just fifteen minutes had elapsed. It seemed like hours. The whole thing felt unreal, like a bad dream.

Whitlock sat in the battered truck, aware that the three German soldiers were staring at him. Nobody attempted conversation. They drove out of the countryside, and into a town. In the distance, Whitlock could see heavy smoke rising, presumably from where the squadron had delivered its payload.

At least one of the bombs had gone off target and struck the town. The truck slowed, and then stopped as they passed a smoking crater, beside a building that was now largely rubble. A crowd of people, mainly civilians, was attempting to put out several small fires with buckets. Whitlock realized that there wasn't much to burn — mostly there were just piles of rubble. Other villagers stood nearby, weeping.

"Get out, American," the middle-aged soldier said in English. "I want to show you something."

Whitlock did as he was told, surprised that the man spoke English, though it was heavily accented. I vant to show you sum-tink.

On the ground, the two young guards gestured at Whitlock, and then seemed to make an appeal to the older man. He held out his hand to Whitlock. “These boys want your coat.”

Whitlock shrugged out of the heavy leather jacket with its warm sheepskin lining. He felt exposed without it — and cold. The boys flipped a coin, and the winner slipped on the coat, which was too big for him. Searching the pockets, the kid found a packet of Beeman’s gum, which he gave to the other boy as a consolation prize.

The older man pointed the way, and they walked a short distance to the ruined building. Whitlock had no idea what the German wanted him to see. Maybe it was a portrait of Hitler or some other symbol of the Third Reich? The walls of this building still stood, and Whitlock noticed a smear of red. It looked exactly as if someone had dipped a large paintbrush in crimson paint and swiped it on the wall.

Then Whitlock saw. Nearby on the ground were the bodies of two girls in school uniforms, partially covered with a blanket. He was horrified to realize that it wasn't paint that he saw on the wall, but blood.

A handful of townspeople began to shout angrily at him. Some shook their fists. Whitlock had no idea what they were saying, but he could guess.

The German soldier pushed Whitlock roughly toward the bodies. Then he bent down and pulled back the blanket. Whitlock guessed that they were twelve or thirteen years old. He had a kid sister that age. Both of the girls' faces looked angelic in death, pale and peaceful, like in an old painting. But their bodies were torn and burned, resembling a raw steak that had made contact with a red-hot grill before being yanked off. The sight made him physically wince away. They’re just kids. School girls. He realized that the devastation to the village could have been from the bombs dropped by Lucky Girl. It didn't matter if it was Whitlock’s plane or another, especially not to the dead girls or these villagers.

Whitlock tried to turn away, but the older German caught him and forced him closer to the bodies. He said something low and angry.

Whitlock had seen enough. He shoved the German away, which caused the two boyish soldiers to point their rifles nervously in his direction.

But Whitlock wasn't interested in escape just then. He bent over and vomited with such force that he sagged to his knees. He was sick repeatedly until nothing came up but thin, ropy spittle.

The older German took hold of him again, but this time he did it almost gently, helping Whitlock to his feet. He even handed him a handkerchief to wipe his mouth.

"I'm so sorry. Whose children are they?" Whitlock asked, looking around at the crowd, which had fallen silent. They would not meet his eyes. Something about Whitlock's reaction had clearly left them embarrassed. They were expecting a monster; what they got was a scared-looking young American who appeared just as horrified as they were at the carnage.

"They are God's children, as are we all," the German soldier said in clear but halting English. "Get in the truck. We will take you to the prison camp now."

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