Hamburg’s flames lit our backs for miles, dimming in our wake until the ruined city ebbed to a match tip on the far horizon.
Soon we were clear of Hamburg. And in those moments after I’d exacted revenge on German soil, a face arose in mind so lucidly I couldn’t imagine shaking it, perhaps ever — a face I’d hoped to forget since I left her but which clearly I couldn’t shake: Françoise’s.
8.
Debriefing back at base at almost 0500 hours was joyous. The first moment of true happiness I’d felt since discovering I would be accepted into flight training. It allowed for a true forgetfulness of all else: This bombing was our whole world in the moments after we returned. Morale soared after our unqualified success. Navigator Smith recounted perfect turns his pilot — the Eastern European Jew now called Poxl West — had executed at each turning point. A low black course of stubble had cropped up on his jutting chin, and the deep furrow of his dark Etonian brow brought a feckless look to his flat face. McSorely described the night sky and the Catherine wheels raised by each blockbuster bomb as it landed on central Hamburg, one after the next, stoking flames so high we couldn’t see the city itself.
Even taciturn Flight Engineer Smith disregarded unspoken protocol and told the WAAFs who questioned us about our perfect run. There was such good cheer in the Nissen hut, I wondered if rest, would come that night for the crew of the S-Sugar. But we all fell immediately to sleep and then, late that morning, I was awakened by Navigator Smith’s cries. They were half-human, a macaw’s squawk, which stirred no man among us but me, all the rest wholly overtaken by exhaustion. I dropped from my bed. I held his thrashing arms. He woke only long enough to dart upright. He looked me in the eyes. He steeled his body. He had long, sinewy arms and a thicket of dark dark hair along them to match his brown brow. I could feel the sisal sharpness of his arm hair in my palms as he thrashed. Sweat covered his face and his eyes flashed.
Then he grew still. He recognized me and returned to himself.
“Wizard flying, young Yid,” he said. “Now let me sleep.”
The evening following our run, there was revelry. We went to the Rooster’s Peck, where Gallsworthy and I played a game of darts. Our crew congratulated me on a perfectly executed run. Any reservations I’d had before dissolved in the warmth of drink. Even McSorely stood me a pint, and from behind his acne-covered face — he was only nineteen, after all, and looked like a schoolboy — I could see a softening of his features. After darts Gallsworthy returned to our table, where he hoisted a warm Harp and said, “To our pilot, Poxl West — a hebe who does some fine flying!” Laughter erupted among the men of S-Sugar. Reconnaissance reported severe damage to the Hamburg Krupps factory. We’d hit our targets. We’d done in Hamburg.
On our meander back to our hut, Gallsworthy held me back until we were a good thousand feet behind the rest of S-Squadron.
“Poxl,” he said. “Poxl, I know you know all about women.” He was slurring his words, and while I should have been thinking of Glynnis, I was thinking about Françoise. “You had Glynnis back in London and you have your cousins. But me…” His weight shifted all the way to his right foot, then to his left, almost tipping him each time. “Me, I’ve never even kissed a girl, if you can believe it.” Gallsworthy was a squat five feet tall, maybe a few inches more, and, even despite his training, nearly two hundred pounds.
I could believe it.
He continued.
“If I could meet a WAAF or some girl in town,” he said.
My kind slovenly friend Gallsworthy needed my help finding love. Even for him a taste of death over Hamburg had touched off a longing for love. I told him that when we were back in London he would come with me and meet my cousin Niny.
“Let’s have the picture of her,” Gallsworthy said. We were back to our Nissen hut by now and though he’d seen the photograph a thousand times, I went to my footlocker and picked out the photo of Niny, Johana, and me along the Elbe in Schalholstice, just outside Brüder Weisberg. We stood beside one another, not touching, and behind us the very vats were sunk into the ground, inside of which my father’s men submerged the hides in need of tanning.
Gallsworthy was the drunkest I’d ever seen him. Now he was lying back on his bed. I took him the photo and he held it very close to his face and said, “Niny, Niny, Niny,” an incantation, until his arms bent back and the picture sat against his chest. He passed out dreaming of my cousin and of the image of my Elbe, which he knew only from that photograph, and which no amount of killing or distance could ever rob from my memory.
9.
Next few days we awoke to fog so thick it was as if we were back up among the clouds. By Wednesday there was an even heavier cover, morning announced only by a subtle glowing change in hue. The Americans were grounded during the day, just as we were at night. It was Thursday before another run could be attempted. Some kind of electricity ran through the crewmen in the briefing room — our turning points were changed, but the destination remained:
We were to make a second run on Hamburg.
All the other bombers in our squadron had flown a second run on the city Tuesday, but we’d been grounded. Upon takeoff we had lost oil pressure and were forced to return to base. They reported what we had: a clear, safe run to the city. There was an edge to their stories. They’d experienced a parallel success to ours, but now they described flying into a column of smoke so thick they could taste soot from the city in their oxygen masks. We had fuzzy heads the days after our victorious run. We had time on our hands from the failed takeoff and the fog. Idle, we began to consider what we’d done.
“How many you suspect we killed on that run?” Gallsworthy said at breakfast. “Thousand? Two?”
“More, I’d think,” McSorely said.
“More than two thousand,” Gallsworthy said. “That’s a lot of civilians.” He paused and took a bite of his sausage. “That’s a lot of anything.”
“Well sure,” McSorely said. “But it’s a huge city. There’re plenty more who survived.”
Again from the edges of my memory came that image: cobblestones rising to mind; Glynnis’s pale skin. Françoise’s broad nose.
Wing Commander Pennington arrived and briefed us on our run. Flight Officer Rowlandson was to fly with S-Sugar on one more run before taking over his own commission.
Soon we lifted off again into a light mist. We weren’t far from base before it grew apparent this was to be a more challenging run. S-Sugar was among the lead bombers. No matter how high we rose through the clouds it felt we would never overcome them. Over the North Sea we finally broke from cloud cover to witness a blanket of undulating gray below. A bomber’s moon provided some light. It wasn’t a help for long. Navigator Smith called out coordinates for our upcoming turning point. We were miles out over the sea, passing above Heligoland, when before us was a billowing column of black pumice. My first thought was that this was what we’d wrought in Hamburg.
We’d ignited Germany. Here, rising nearly 35,000 feet above the ground, was the evidence. Then the swelling and dying of dozens of white explosions ran through the great black mass. It was hard to know how so much flak could be thrown into the air. Perhaps we were witnessing some unprecedented new Nazi weapon, some horrible counterpunch to the silver strips we’d dropped to disrupt Nazi radar and which had allowed us to light such a monumental conflagration.