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D’Angelo dropped him without a word under the nose of a B-17F sitting just outside its sandbag revetment. Bitter saw that it had been christened “Danny’s Darling.”
The enlisted members of the crew were already there beside a pile of parachutes. They were wearing unfastened sheepskin high-altitude gear.
“Good morning,” Bitter said.
The only response was a nod from one of them.
He took a closer look at “Danny’s Darling” itself. It was almost new, but there were seven bombs (each signifying a mission) and four swastikas (each signifying a confirmed downed German aircraft) painted on the fuselage just below and forward of the cockpit windshield. Just below these was a painting of a raven-haired, long-legged, hugely bosomed female. There were three large patches on the fuselage. The ship had been hit, and by something larger than machine-gun fire.
For the first time he remembered that he had not, as he had promised, written Sarah the moment he arrived in England. And he also realized that he was right now torn between two obligations: There would have been no question of flying a mission he had been ordered to fly. He was an officer. But he hadn’t been ordered aboard this B-17. As Sergeant Draper had pointed out, it “wasn’t what Canidy had in mind for him.” And if he got killed, that would deprive Joe of his father, as well as Sarah of her husband. Did he have any right to endanger his life when it affected the lives of other people? Did he really have to make this mission so as to better discharge his duty with the flying bombs, or was he simply being a romantic fool?
It was very easy for Ed Bitter to conclude that he was a professional warrior, and what professional warriors did was go to war. He put Joe and Sarah from his mind. Major Danny Ester and the officer crew arrived on a weapons carrier a few minutes later. Ester introduced him, then went through a perfunctory examination of the crew’s gear, and then ordered everybody aboard.
IX
Chapter ONE
Fersfield Army Air Corps Station
0415 Hours 10 January 1943
One of the crewmen helped Bitter put the Browning .50-caliber machine gun in its mount, then asked him if he had ever fired one before.
“Yes,” Bitter said.
That was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But at Annapolis he had fired an air-cooled .30-caliber Browning machine gun. Functionally they were the same. And he’d fired enough rounds from the two fixed .50-caliber Brownings mounted in the nose of his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk in Burma and China to acquire some expertise with the trajectory and velocity of the bullet. The only difference was that if he had to fire this weapon, he would aim the weapon itself rather than the whole airplane. That would probably be a good deal easier.
The crewman took him at his word.
“Major Ester said when you were squared away, you could go up front,” the crewman said.
Bitter nodded and smiled. Then he heard the roar of a B-17 taking off. He looked out the oblong window and saw a wildly painted B-17 just breaking ground. The fuselage and wings were painted bright yellow, and on the yellow background was painted a series of black triangles. The paint job o
bviously had been designed to make the aircraft extraordinarily visible, but aside from concluding that it was used in some sort of training, Bitter had no idea what it could be, or why a training aircraft should be permitted to be taking off at the same time as a bomber group.
He made his way forward and stood just behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, then looked at the controls and instrument panel. There was an awe-some array of instruments and levers, but that was because there were four engines, each requiring its own gauges and controls. The panel really wasn’t all that complicated. When the time came, he imagined he’d be able to make the transition into B-17s without much difficulty. An airplane was an airplane. Five or six hours in the air with a competent instructor, and he could be taught to fly a B-17.
He watched Major Danny Ester go through the checklist and get the engines started. When he decided he could do it without getting in the way, he asked him about the yellow B-17.
“Some people call it the Judas Sheep,” Ester said. “Because it leads the lambs to slaughter.”
“I don’t understand,” Bitter confessed.
“We use it to form up,” Ester told him, and then explained. Most B-17 pilots were pretty inexperienced. Only a very few of them had 300 hours in the air. Many of them had become aircraft commanders with no more than 150 hours total time, including their primary flight training. And there were very few really skilled navigators. So the wildly painted aircraft were used to form the squadrons once they were airborne. The Judas Sheep took off first and then flew in shallow climbing wide circles around the airbase. One by one, as the bombers of the mission rose, they formed up behind it. When all the aircraft were in the formation and at altitude, the Judas sheep took up the course the bombers were to take to France, or Germany, or wherever, and then dropped out of the formation. The system, Major Ester told Bitter, had greatly reduced in-flight collisions, which had caused nearly as many casualties as enemy fighters and antiaircraft.
Ester shut down all but one engine—to conserve fuel, Bitter reasoned— and there was then a five-minute wait until a flare rose into the early morning from the control tower. Then Ester started a second engine and began to taxi. By the time he reached the end of the line of aircraft waiting to take off, all four engines were turning.
He stopped behind another B-17 and checked the engine magnetos. When it was finally their turn to move onto the runway, Ester didn’t even slow at the threshold, but turned onto the runway as he pushed the throttles to TAKEOFF power. The plane immediately began to accelerate. There was not the feeling of being pushed hard against the seat that came in a fighter plane, but the available power was still impressive.
Bitter remembered from his study of the Dash-One that at TAKEOFF power the B-17’s four Wright Cyclone engines each produced 1,200 horsepower, 150 horses more than the 1040 Allison in a P-40.
On the ground, the B-17 seemed lumbering and ungainly, but once Ester lifted it into the air, it immediately became surprisingly graceful. Ester climbed steeply to the right, and Bitter could see the triangle-marked yellow B-17 above them. Ester took up a position just behind it, then spent some time working with the flight engineer. They were synchronizing the engines and setting the fuel-air mixture at the leanest workable mixture.
They circled the field as they climbed to mission altitude, passed through the cloud cover at about 9,000 feet, and emerged into the light of early morning. When Bitter looked out the window and saw the aluminum armada that filled the sky, he was far less impressed than he had thought he would be. There was none of the elation he’d felt in Burma and China when he’d climbed out of the cloud cover and scanned the sky for the Japanese. He felt, in fact, very uneasy.
Uneasy, because he was helpless. This was more like being carted off to an operating room than flying a plane.
Just before they reached the Thames Estuary, their fighter escort appeared. Shining little dots that climbed out of the cloud cover became identifiable P-38s and P-51s as they climbed past the bomber formation, and then became little dots again as they took up protective positions above the formation, some to the front of the bombers and some to the rear.
