Gallsworthy showed me a dozen large paper-covered packages sitting below the waist of the plane. Rowlandson had left them there to be loaded. He would drop these packages as we entered German airspace. Neither he nor any of us knew then how it was to work, but the effect of the dropping of these packages was meant to clear our flight path. Gallsworthy paused in his painting and picked up a package. He turned it over in his hand, as skeptical as I was that a paper-covered package would effect much of anything in the midst of that “total war.”
The aerodrome was a din of engines starting, flight engineers checking bombers. The sun was moving ever closer to a dense stand of trees in the western sky that brought to mind my first trip to the cave with Glynnis. Water had been lying still in the fields then. Though we hadn’t seen much damage, the first time a huge brown crater revealed itself out there, Glynnis had gasped. I hadn’t realized I was clenching my fists until I heard her. We’d both grown so accustomed to the ruin of buildings all across London. But seeing earth torn up like that — no human harmed, no building destroyed; no real danger, only the ability of a two-ton bomb to move solid grass-covered earth — had some new effect on us.
I just said, “Navigator Smith was after me again.”
Gallsworthy suggested I begin keeping clear of Smith — I was providing him too much ammunition with which to antagonize me.
“These are nineteen- and twenty-year-old men you’re talking to,” Gallsworthy said. “Boys like you, but who haven’t been through what you have.”
Just then word came from Wing Commander Pennington: Cloud cover over Germany was too dense. We were a scrub yet again.
That night there was an NAAFI dance downriver at Grimsby. While the rest of the crew went out I hoped to give the night over to a long letter to Niny. But Iago that he was, Navigator Smith knew the business of roiling emotions well. I stayed in our Nissen hut and spent the night instead writing a posthumous letter to my mother. I wrote her of the Tiger Moths and the vacuous chill of the air at thirty thousand feet, where nightly now we flew to drop huge bombs on the very villains who had sent her to her death, and to move ourselves ever closer to the heaven where she now resided.
I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I wrote her things I couldn’t quite admit aloud to anyone but her: I’d never made it back to see Glynnis, and I’d never told Glynnis about my mother’s death. The weight of that guilt, knowing she was now dead. Even when she and I were quietly making love I would sometimes close my eyes and think of Françoise. That anger had sent me fleeing from Rotterdam when I honestly still to this very day didn’t know that I’d wanted to leave Françoise — but I had, and now I didn’t know her fate. And now I’d begun to picture myself there, to imagine what half-bombed Rotterdam looked like and what I, Poxl, as a villain looked like to the woman I’d left without a word of my leaving. Somehow I felt that if anyone would understand this unnamable emotion it was my mother. I told her how many times I’d wished I hadn’t walked out of our house without saying good-bye to her, too, the first of my flights beginning that moment I left her home, the one that imbued my muscles with the memory of leaving that allowed me to depart Rotterdam, and that I never truly thought I wouldn’t get another chance, how I wished I could see her. How I wished I could see her. How I would always for the rest of my life have wished I could see her again.
When I’d finished I sealed the envelope and placed it in my footlocker, where over the days to come, as this letter writing would become something of a habit, I would accrue quite a collection of undeliverables.
7.
Saturday night we were briefed again, this time by Wing Commander Pennington himself. We arrived at the airfield at 2100 hours. At 2315 we took off. Clear skies, a rarefied night absent moon or cloud. Three hundred miles from the English coast we joined our wing in formation over the North Sea. We were in rear right. This was the most dreaded position, most exposed to flanking attacks. Still I was grateful to have to worry only about the bomber to my left. Maintaining formation could be the difference between living and dying.
As I moved in, Navigator Smith came on the interphone.
“Press on regardless, Captain West.” I said certainly, but suggested that perhaps we should keep quiet, as we had for our former captain, Flight Officer Ford. This didn’t keep Smith from bugging Gallsworthy and McSorely about the WAAFs he was sure they’d been with the night before. He ran on until we reached the German border. Contrails of Stirlings strung out thousands of feet below. At that height I was reminded of Goethe’s description of blindness: “Everything near becomes distant.” Though I knew intellectually those fighters were a thousand, two thousand feet away, that distance might have been all distances, or none, in the enormous Prussian sky.
Our rendezvous point, position A, was less than an hour from Hamburg. Now Gallsworthy was to begin dropping his mysterious packages. Over the interphone the only sound was of his timing the drops: “One Lancaster, two Lancaster, three Lancaster,” all the way to sixty, then another drop. Frigid air filled the cockpit each time he opened the window. When he reset his count we looked behind to where thousands of silver swimming minnows filled dark air, reflecting the lights of bombers. Yellow flares marked the path before us. As we approached the Kiel Canal the previously cloudless sky filled with brown clouds of flak smoke.
Gallsworthy called out that he’d seen a Lancaster far off to our starboard. All seven men of its crew bailed out.
Then we were through it without incident.
Another half hour and Navigator Smith came over the interphone: We had achieved our final turning point at Kellinghausen. What we saw before us then made procedure unnecessary.
Hamburg was already glowing, an earthbound star. Lancaster squadrons all across the midnight horizon were lit by individual auras against the dark summer sky. By the time we made our approach, no green or yellow flare was discernible. They’d mixed together with the blockbusters each squadron had already dropped, four-thousand-pound bombs and four-pound incendiaries landing again and again as our bombers dropped their loads, blooming like enormous sunflowers thousands of feet down.
Gallsworthy came on the interphone: What was there to drop on? Bombs atop bombs? I thought of my mother. I thought of my father, and of Françoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, “Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb.”
Navigator Smith came after: “Press on,” he said.
I felt the lightening of our plane as our bombload went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke.
I banked left.
Already we were on our return path. We encountered not a single Luftwaffe fighter. Those silvery minnows Gallsworthy had dropped had fooled German radar into thinking there were thousands of bombers all across the vector on which the minnows flew. Bombers before and after us had dropped the packages, too, and the Luftwaffe fighters hadn’t had enough fuel to stay skyward long enough to engage us. We’d approached Hamburg on the driest night of the summer and hardly faced any resistance.
Hamburg was given over to flame.
With the city burning behind us the night was no longer dark. Western suburbs of Hamburg burned phosphorescent, glowing out to their fuzzy lighted edges. There, glinting amid the dark earth below us on the path back to base, was the Elbe. The river flowed northward from below my father’s tannery, through Hamburg and on to the North Sea on the other side of which I was now stationed. For the first time since arriving at RAF Grimsby I caught a whiff of days swimming with Johana and Niny, gnats buzzing in the low Bohemian evening. Below us the shrapnel of a bomb found its way into the Elbe, floating upstream and out to the North Sea. River water carrying it had flowed from Leitmeritz and from Schalholstice, where it cooled in vats of tanning leather at my father’s business. Through Poland. Through the city I had just set ablaze during the dimming July night.