The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [59]
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