Serenade to the Big Bird

time.

1

FIRST CREW

1st Lieut. Samuel Newton, Pilot. 23 years old, of Sioux City, Iowa.

1st Lieut. Bert Stiles, Co-pilot. 23 years old, of Denver, Colorado.

1st Lieut. Donald M. Bird, Bombardier. 24 years old, of Oswego, New York.

1st Lieut. Grant H. Benson, Navigator. 22 years old, of Stambaugh, Michigan.

T/Sgt. William F. Lewis, Engineer. 20 years old, of Grand Island, Nebraska.

T/Sgt. Edwin C. Ross, Radio Operator. 23 years old, of Buffalo, New York.

S/Sgt. Gilbert D. Spaugh, Toggleer. 21 years old, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

S/Sgt. Gordon E. Beach, Ball-turret gunner. 34 years old, of Denver, Colorado.

S/Sgt. Basil J. Crone, Waist-gunner. 24 years old, of Wichita, Kansas.

S/Sgt. Edward L. Sharpe, Tail-gunner. 21 years old, of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

SAM and I both went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and were fraternity brothers. Neither of us did very much except play around at school before we went to the cadets. It was pure luck that we ran into each other in Salt Lake City. We finally talked some WAC into putting us on the same crew.

Don used to work in a bank before the war. He joined the crew in the middle of phase training at Alexandria, Louisiana. He was a bombardier-instructor and he didn’t have to go to war at all, but he wanted to see what a war is like and he wanted to wear the ETO ribbon with a star on it.

Grant went to school for a while at Michigan State before the war, and knocked around the country, and did a stretch in the infantry before he became a navigator. He joined the crew in Alexandria also.

Lewis drove a cab in Grand Island before the war, and ran around with a girl there, and spent a lot of time wishing he was back.

Ross was some sort of clerk in the daytime in civilian days, and a big-time operator at night. When the crews were cut from ten to nine men he used the right waist-gun instead of the roof-gun in the radio hatch.

Spaugh was the right-waist gunner when we had a ten-man crew, and checked out later as a toggleer-bombardier, when they tried to make a ground-gripper out of him. He didn’t do much of anything before the war except go down to the beach.

Beach was the only married man on the crew. He used to be a mechanic during the week, and a fisherman during the week ends.

Crone was the armorer and the only one on the crew who knew much about bomb racks. He’d lived all over and done most everything. Sheet metal was his trade, but he’d worked in the oil fields and had been around.

Sharpe lived on a farm before the war. For a while he wanted to be a doctor, and learned a lot of medical terms and took a clinical interest in almost everything. After the war he is going back to the farm and lie under a shady tree.

Except for the bombardier and navigator, the crew was put together in the 2nd Air Force combat pool in Salt Lake City, and shipped out together for phase training and later flew a new B-17 to England.

2

TO BEGIN WITH

IT WAS summer and there was war all over the world. There was war in Normandy and Italy and plenty of war in Russia. The same war was going on in the islands and in the sky over Japan.

The only part of the war I knew anything about personally was the air war from England. Above me on the wall was a map of Europe. Every time I came home again to England I drew another bomb on the map over the town we visited.

A good part of the time here, there is no past, and certainly no future. There is only now, the now of any oxygen mask and the now of Berlin or Kiel from 25,000 feet. That now is just as mixed up as the past, and sometimes just as beautiful.

The queer thing about this part of the war is that it never stays the same for any length of time. Sometimes it is as unreal as a dream, and as quiet and lonely as moonlight, and sometimes it is horrible and twisted with fear and the feel of death.

A lifetime is always a patchwork affair, I guess, with the seconds and hours and days thrown into a pile of other seconds and hours and days. Some of them add up into something else, and some of them are left way outside like a Fort out of formation, connected to nothing, all alone in mid-air,

I seem to be a hundred different people these days. The days take turns using the face and the body. No mood lasts more than a couple of hours. My continuity is shot.

The world is fine… the world is okay, maybe … the world is a weary hole… the world is a hopeless sickening mess… the world is blue shadows and full of sun… all that in a day, all that in an hour sometimes.

3

FIRST MISSION

WE WENT on our first one on the nineteenth of April. We had a practice mission the afternoon before, the first time we’d flown in a month, and we weren’t bad, so the colonel said we could go.

Some major gave us a little talk about how we might as well start sometime, and were there any questions, and just fly that baby in close and you’ll come home every time.

The squadron was short on crews or we would have had some more practice missions.

After the major let us go, Sam got the crew over in the corner and told us we’d have to be on the ball from here on in.

And you’ve got to fly in close, he told me. I’m not going to do all the work.

He had slept most of the way across the Atlantic, but now he was feeling serious.

I’d only flown formation in a 17 twice, once in the phases and once on the practice mission. I wasn’t very hot.

This is the big league now, Sam said.

Everybody said so. We’d been in the Bomb Group for four days and everyone in the Group knew he was in the big league.

After Sam let the crew go I asked him, Are you scared?

I’m Sam, he said.

He was all right. He was ready to go.

We went over to the club then. It didn’t seem any different. Nobody seemed to care that there was an alert on, and a raid tomorrow. Nobody went off in the corner to brood.

We had pork chops for dinner, and I sat next to a guy in our squadron named La something. I called him La French, because I could never remember the last part. He was big and acted half-drunk most of the time and he looked like a pirate.

So you’ve joined our noble band, he said.

Well probably go tomorrow, I said.

A joy ride, he said. Lucky boy!

Where to?

What does it matter? He waved his hands. The Luftwaffe is beat. Haven’t you heard?

That was fine with me. I wanted to see a Focke-Wulf some time, but I didn’t care about seeing one tomorrow.

After chow La French and I went out to say good night to his airplane. The dispersal area is way down past the skeet range and a turnip field. We took our bikes and rode through a world of blue and green and soft through the haze.

We saw that the plane was chocked in good for the night, and then hung around waiting for the sun to go down.

Sort of pretty, La French said.

I thought he was talking to himself, so I didn’t say anything.

*

I was well established in the sack when a bunch of guys came into the room and turned the lights on. A bombardier and a navigator were putting their co-pilot to bed, but he’d broken away into my room.

He was pretty drunk, and he really had the bright stare of death in his eyes.

So you made the team? this co-pilot said.

I said, I guess so. I was about half-asleep.

All he did was laugh, just stand there and laugh, until the whole room was full of it, and shaking from it.

The bombardier and navigator got him under control then and took him away to bed. The bombardier came back after they put him away.

That baby’s got it bad, he said. He won’t last much longer. He’s seen too many guys go down.

When the lights were out again I lay there for a while, not ready to go to sleep.

I wasn’t scared. I was just wondering what I was doing here at all. I’d been building up to that night for a long time. I used to dream about it at school, sitting there drinking cokes with some girl, reading the airplane magazines. I used to think about it all the time in the cadets. And now we were really here, ready to go to war in the morning. We were going out to knock off the Germans.

I knew right then that I didn’t know much about killing.

I didn’t feel like the Polish Spitfire pilots we met in Iceland, coming over. They had it bad. They wanted to kill every German in the world. But it was different with me, I’d never been shot at, or bombed. My folks live on York Street in Denver, which is a long way from this war.

All I knew about war I got through books and movies and magazine articles, and listening to a few big wheels who came through the cadet schools to give us the low-down. It wasn’t in my blood, it was all in my mind.

The whole idea was to blow up just as much Germany tomorrow as possible. From way up high, it wouldn’t mean a thing to me. I wouldn’t know if any women or little kids got in the way. I’d thought about it before, but that night it was close. The more I thought of it, the uglier it seemed.

What I wanted to do tomorrow was ski down Baldy up at Sun Valley, or wade out into the surf at Santa Monica, and get all knocked out in the waves, and come in and lie in the sun all afternoon.

Instead I was going on a trip, a long trip, to help some other guys beat up a town, or an oil plant, or a steel mill. It seemed like a pretty futile way to live.

Then I thought a while about the eight guys who had slept in my bed in the last four months. They were all dead or down in some German Stalag, or getting drunk in Sweden, or hiding in a French ditch somewhere. They hadn’t hurt the bed much. It was a nice sack, the only good one in England up to then.

Some joker dragged me out of it at two in the morning.

Come on, he said, breakfast at two thirty, briefing at three thirty. It was Lieutenant Porada.

Somebody upstairs who wasn’t on the list was shouting, Drag the Luftwaffe up and give ‘em a blow for me.

I walked over to the mess hall through the dark. The stars were out and it was pretty cold.

Before missions we used to eat at the big dogs’ mess hall, Number 1, with the colonels and the majors, and the ground-grippers like weathermen and intelligence. I was the first one in there, and I had to eat eggs and toast for a whole hour before we went to briefing.

The briefing was in a big overgrown Nissen hut. Some major got up first and told us we were going down south to Kassel to a place called Eschwege, where the Germans had a fighter park, a sort of shipping point and comfort station for ships clearing to the forward bases. They showed us where it was on the big wall map, and how it looked to the recco cameras the last time they were over there. The weatherman showed us where the clouds would be, and the guy in charge of traffic told us how to taxi out.

The formation was all drawn up on the blackboard and I copied down all the ship numbers and where they flew. We were flying right wing off the lead ship of the high squadron.

The navigators went somewhere else for some more briefing. Sam went off to change his pants, and I queued up in the co-pilots line for kits. The gunners were somewhere else getting the same thing. There wasn’t room for them in our briefing hut.

Standing there in line, I could tell this was going to be the bad time. We were supposed to have a record escort, 47’s and 51’s all over, all the way. But we were going in deep, and the Germans didn’t want us over there at all.

The equipment hut was a mess with everyone trying to dress in the same place at the same time. I decided to wear an electric suit because I hate long-johns. I put on my O.D.’s over that, and a summer flying suit over that, and a leather jacket on top. A Mae West comes last.

I was sweating before I got into all my clothes, and by the time I had heaved my flak suit and parachute on the track I could feel the sweat rolling down my knees and pooling up in my insteps.

The rest of the crew was still struggling in the equipment room, so Crone and I lay down among the parachutes and looked at the stars. It was time to think again.

I said hello to Lady Luck up there somewhere in the blue. As long as she went along too I knew I’d be all right. I told her where we were going, but I think she knew already.

The others came out in time and the truck took us out to the plane. Everybody was talking fast and laughing, and I felt sort of ready, like I’d been waiting for a long time for this to happen.

Lewis was trying to put his guns in the turret, while I tried to stow my flak suit under the seat where I could reach for it fast.

Goddamn it, I said, there ought to be more room in these goddamned things.

Take it easy, he said.

I couldn’t find my helmet, and one of my gloves was missing. Bird and Benson were all tangled up in the nose getting their guns in. Sam was the only smart one. He stayed outside talking to the crew chief until everyone else got set.

We were flying somebody else’s plane, the Keystone Mama. I turned my flashlight on the brown lady with no brassiere, painted on the