Smith and McSorely formed one pair, Gallsworthy and I another, and we played a game called Cricket. Throwing the darts was difficult, a skill I’d never encountered. These Brits were so practiced at it I’d never catch up. Gallsworthy had played at a pub near his home before he enlisted, and he was quite good. After a half hour the score was close. Navigator Smith took his throws and missed all three of his shots at the nineteen he and McSorely needed to close out. He’d just missed his mark with the first two darts, but the third clanked off the wood of the board and bounced back to the floor near him. It stuck upright in a floorboard.
“Bloody hell!” Smith yelled.
As with many men who are for some reason or another constitutionally angry, he was as hard on himself as he was on everyone else.
I went to retrieve the two darts stuck in the board.
Suddenly pain pinched my right shoulder.
“What the hell’re you thinking!” Gallsworthy shouted.
He came over and pulled out the dart that had punctured my shoulder. We both looked at Navigator Smith. Even McSorely was staring at him. Smith colored at his neck. The blush overtook his face.
“It slipped,” Navigator Smith said. “Or I didn’t see him there. Or something.”
It was clear from his pinched, stoic face that he knew exactly what he’d done, and it was clear what he’d intended. Gallsworthy took me off to the infirmary where a WAAF nurse sewed the wound up with just a couple of stitches and discarded my bloodied undershirt. After that, I steered clear of Navigator Smith when I could.
6.
Our aerodrome was quiet for the next week as we lived most of early July under the misty scrim of northeast fog. Each morning we woke for another day of refresher classes in aircraft recognition. The puncture wound in my shoulder scabbed over and the stitches were removed. Navigator Smith and I ceased to make eye contact. The S-Sugar crew awaited word of our next major attack. It was during this time I began to settle into the kind of routine that makes one’s endeavor feel as if it is in fact his life. Finally, it was announced that we would be sent over a defenseless Belgian town near the German border, and after that flight came off without any trouble, Flight Officer Ford informed me I would take over as pilot of S-Sugar on the following night’s raid. I was to bring my crew for debriefing at 1300 hours.
There was talk all day about how our Belgian run was a cheesecake mission to give us rest for one more serious. We were a scrub yet again that evening due to the density of the mid-July cloud cover.
Thursday, we were due at a briefing midafternoon. Our wing commander got up and read some saber-rattling from Bomber Harris about how the mission we were about to undertake was the most important of the bombing campaign to date.
Our target was Hamburg.
All of Hamburg.
In addition to being the site of the Krupps factory, where many of the ball bearings necessary to the Nazi war machine were manufactured, and the biggest U-boat factory in all of Germany, Hamburg was a populous city deep within German borders. We were to hit either or both factories. We were to damage German morale. Bomber Harris made it clear this attack could turn the momentum of the war. This was our opportunity to take out specific targets, to drive German morale to a nadir.
It wasn’t lost on any one of us that part of our mission was not to kill Nazis this time. It was to kill Germans, Nazis or otherwise.
Wing Commander Pennington turned to a map detailing our flight path from the aerodrome deep into German airspace. We would be going deep enough that we couldn’t alter our direction — Manchesters flying with us, with smaller fuel tanks than the Lancasters’, would continue on all the way to North Africa — and the approach would place us not over Cuxhaven, but over the Kiel Canal and Lübeck, both of which were notorious for the intensity of Luftwaffe aerodromes, which sent up hundreds of fighters each time they spotted us.
“No way we’ll get past all those Me110’s,” Navigator Smith said.
Wing Commander Pennington assured Smith and the rest of us that there was something new awaiting the Luftwaffe that night to protect us.
We had a temporary second pilot on this flight, along to observe before taking over his own bomber. He turned out to be an acquaintance of Gallsworthy from his Initial Training Wing, a Liverpudlian called Rowlandson. He was charged with loading S-Sugar with this new weapon we were to use against the Germans. After our briefing he and Gallsworthy, who as the bomb aimer would deliver our secret weapon, went off to discuss it.
I went back to our Nissen hut, where I shaved once again. While I was shaving, Navigator Smith came into the latrine. I hesitated for a moment, but it was too late to turn around to leave. I was shirtless, and I still had a large gauze bandage on my right shoulder protecting my wound. Smith looked up and saw the patch. He didn’t acknowledge me.
I harbored some hope he might provide me a bit of a wider berth given that there were just the two of us. No matter how acerbic a man might be, it has been my experience that if one finds himself alone with him, just two men without any further audience, an interaction might grow easier.
Navigator Smith proved an exception to this rule.
I wondered aloud if there hadn’t been some concern among our crew that we would be dropping bombs not just on selected targets in Hamburg, but that we would be bombing the city as a whole.
“What of it,” Smith said.
“We would be killing civilians,” I said. “We might be knowingly killing civilians.”
“What do you know of killing civilians?”
I told him that before arriving in London I’d lived for a year in Rotterdam, and the people there I knew had most likely been killed by Luftwaffe bombs.
Now Smith just looked at me.
“So that’s your girl you were talking about?”
I tried to explain that I’d been meaning to speak of a Briton named Glynnis, to whom I’d briefly been engaged and who’d died in central London. Instead, though I’d not meant it, I’d referred to a woman I’d known in a Dutch brothel.
“I don’t need your whole damn family tree. I’ll just tell you the same thing I told you last time,” Smith said. “We’re here to drop bombs on the heads of some Nazi bastards. This is total war. Look — you’re going to have to adopt a press-on attitude, Pilsudski. That’s your mantra from here on out: Press. On. Regardless. Isn’t it what you’re here for?”
I didn’t respond.
“Let me pose a question, then,” Smith said. “You think your pain for this Glynnis or Françoise or whatever is so unique. What makes you think all the boys in our squadron haven’t lost girls of their own? Aren’t thinking about their girls back in London?”
Navigator Smith wiped his face of shaving cream. He studied himself in the mirror. I thought to say something more, but there was nothing more to say. I’d lost Glynnis to the Luftwaffe attack. I’d left Rotterdam. I’d left Niny and Johana, and Johana had lost her paramour and most likely her husband, and my parents had been taken from their home. And I’d lost Françoise, left her thinking only of what it meant to me — never what it meant to her. I could still hardly conceive of what she’d thought I’d done.
In those moments with Navigator Smith, there wasn’t anything to explain, nothing to talk about. He left the latrine.
I donned my RAF deep blues and dressed in layer after layer now that I knew intimately the cold of thirty thousand feet. My crew convened on the airstrip near S-Sugar at 1800 hours to await the call for takeoff. Gallsworthy had conferred upon himself a kill for one of the Messerschmitts that went down over Cuxhaven. He was only now painting a swastika on the side of our Lancaster by way of commemoration. I asked after the secret weapon the wing commander had mentioned at the briefing.