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But there was nothing to do but try. After what seemed like a very long time with the needle well past the NEVER EXCEED red line on the airspeed indicator, he felt a lessening of the centrifugal force pressing him into his seat, and then saw that the world had stopped spinning. They were in a steep dive.
And there was a frightening pain in his knee and lower leg. The pain was intense, but what frightened him was the possibility that his shot-up, still-stiff knee was about to collapse on him.
He didn’t remember pain as he had applied pressure to the rudder pedals. But there was a reason for that: The adrenaline fed into his system by fear had overcome the pain.
Now that he was no longer quite so terrified, the pain had registered. It was a strange pain, dull, like a toothache, and with it came an uncomfortable sensation he couldn’t quite describe. It was as if the bones of his leg and knee were collapsing. When he pushed on the rudder pedal, the upper leg seemed to fold downward into the knee and lower leg.
It was perhaps only a sensation. There had been extensive nerve damage when he had taken the Jap slug in his knee, and the doctors had told him that he could expect to experience “ghost” sensations while nerves that were not wholly destroyed regenerated. So maybe faulty nerves were sending the brain erroneous signals.
He hoped that was the case. If his knee collapsed, they were in deep trouble. It would be impossible to fly this airplane with only one functioning leg.
He reached up and pulled back on the throttles, then forced himself to very slowly bring the bucking, screaming aircraft from its near-vertical dive to lesser angles, and finally to something approaching horizontal.
But the airspeed indicator showed he was near stall speed. And when he looked out the window, he was horrifyingly close to the ground. He pushed the throttles forward and felt almost instantly the surge of power, then a pull to the right. His eyes flew up to the instrument panel and out the window. The outboard engine on the port side had stopped, and the inboard engine was smoking.
Desperately, he searched the overhead control panel for the ENGINE FIRE switches, and threw the ones for the portside engines. Then he cut the smoking engine and feathered its prop.
He was 500 feet off the ground on two engines, but he was in straight and level flight. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and he felt a strange coolness in his lap. He had pissed his pants.
He checked the instrument panel. The master artificial horizon was at a crazy angle. He looked over to the horizon on the copilot’s panel and saw that the burst of machine-gun fire—or was it a cannon shell?—that had killed Ester had taken out the copilot’s panel as well.
He glanced around for the flight engineer: I need some help to fly this sonofabitch!
The flight engineer was nowhere in sight. But Ester was: As Bitter watched, a fist-size lump of his brain tissue slipped out of his shattered head and then hung there, suspended by a vein or something.
Bitter threw up before he felt nauseated, the vomitus landing in his lap.
He grabbed the intercom mike.
“Somebody come up here!” he ordered.
He looked at the magnetic compass mounted on the top of the windshield. The Plexiglas window had been shattered within an inch of the compass, but the compass seemed to be working. He checked by steering right and then left.
The compass responded by swinging. That meant, since it was working, that he was headed northeast—in other words, into Germany, in the direction of Berlin.
The flight engineer appeared, looking dazed.
“Navigator and bombardier are dead, sir,” he said.
“Get the copilot out of his seat,” Bitter ordered. “And then get Major Ester out of the way.”
Bitter started the B-17 on a slow and level 180-degree turn. It took all of his concentration. His inexperience with B-17s was made incredibly worse by having all his power on one wing. And when he applied much rudder pedal pressure, a burning pain shot up and down his leg from his ankle to his crotch.
When he next had time to look up, he saw that the flight engineer had pulled Ester along the narrow aisle and covered his head and torso with his sheepskin jacket. A moment later, another of the crewmen appeared, and between them they manhandled the copilot from his seat.
The odds, Bitter thought, strangely calm, against getting this airplane back on two engines are staggering. And even if I can get it to a decent cruising altitude, there will be swarms of fighters waiting to take us out. The only chance we have is to keep doing exactly what I’m doing now: flying it 500 feet off the ground, headed in the general direction of England.
The flight engineer leaned over him.
“Everybody in the back is okay,” he said.
“What about the copilot?” Bitter asked.
“He’s bleeding bad,” the engineer said, and then asked what was on his mind: “Are you going to crash-land it, sir?”
“If we lose one of the two engines we still have, we’ll crash, period,” Bitter said without thinking.
He looked at the inboard port engine. The propeller was turning slightly in its feathered condition. The switch was still on, but there was no smoke.
