Hart's War Read online

  “Bombardier? You ready?” The captain’s voice had increased in pitch, but still seemed unhurried. “Ain’t gonna take but one little ol’ bite at these boys, so let’s make it worth our whiles to be here.” He laughed, which echoed over the intercom. The captain was a popular man, the sort of person who could find some dry, tumbleweed humor in even the direst of situations; who defeated almost all their obvious fears with the steady Texas drawl that never seemed ruffled, or even mildly irritated, even when flak was exploding around the plane and small pieces of deadly red-hot metal were ringing against the Mitchell’s steel frame like the insistent knocking of some boorish and angry neighbor. The less obvious fears, Tommy knew, could never be completely destroyed.

  Tommy Hart closed his eyes to the night, trying to squeeze away memory. This didn’t work. It never worked.

  He heard the captain’s voice again: “All right, boys, here we go. What is it our friends the limeys say? ‘Tally ho!’ Now, anyone here got any idea what the hell they mean by that?”

  The twin fourteen-cylinder Wright Cyclone engines started screaming as the captain pushed them far past their redline. The maximum speed of the Mitchell was supposed to be two hundred and eighty-four miles per hour, but Tommy Hart knew they had pressed past that point. They were coming in out of the sun as best they could, low against the horizon, and he thought showing up nice and dark in the sights of every gun in the convoy.

  Lovely Lydia shuddered slightly as the bomb bay doors opened, and then again, buffeted in the sky by the sudden wind of fire, as the guns awaiting them opened up. Black puffs filled the air, and the motors screamed in defiance. The copilot was shouting something incomprehensible as the plane ripped through the air toward the line of ships. Tommy had risen from his seat, finally staring through the cockpit window, his hands gripping a steel support bar. For the smallest of moments, he caught sight of the first of the German destroyers, its wake streaming out in a white tail behind it, as it spun about in the water, almost like a ballet dancer’s pirouette, smoke from all its weapons rising into the air.

  Lovely Lydia was slammed once, then again, skewing through the sky. Tommy Hart had felt his throat dry up, and some sound was welling up from deep within himself, half a shout, half a groan, as he stared out ahead at the line of ships desperately trying to maneuver out of the path of the bombing run.

  “Let ’em go!” he’d shouted, but his voice had been lost in the scream of the engines and the thudding of the flak bursting all around them. The plane carried six five-hundred-pound bombs, and the technique used in skip-bombing a convoy was not unlike shooting a twenty-two at a line of metal ducks in a state fair sideshow, except the ducks couldn’t fire back. The bombardier would ignore the Norden bombsight, which didn’t really work all that well anyway, and line up each target by eye, release a bomb, then twitch the plane and line up the next. It was fast and frightening, speed and terror all mixed together.

  When done properly, the bombs would rebound off the surface of the water and careen into the target like a bowling ball bounced down an alleyway toward the pins. The bombardier was only twenty-two, fresh-faced, and from a farm in Pennsylvania, but he had grown up shooting deer in the thick woods of the countryside of his home state, and he was very good at what he did, very cool, very composed, unaware that every microsecond took them closer to their own deaths, just as it took them closer to the deaths they were trying to achieve.

  “One away!” the voice from the nose of the plane crackled over the intercom, distant, as if shouted from some field far away. “Two gone! Three!” Lovely Lydia was shuddering bow to stern, torn by the force of the bullets flying toward her, the release of the bombs and the speed of its own wind ripping at her wings. “All away! Get us out of here, captain!”

  The engines surged again, as the captain pulled back on the stick, lifting the bomber into the air. “Rear turret! What y’all see?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, captain! One hit! No three! No, damn it, five hits! Jesus Christ! Omigod, Omigod! They got the Duck! Oh, no, Green Eyes, too!”

  “Hang on, boys,” the captain had said. “We’ll be home for dinner. Tommy, check it out! Tell me what y’all see back there!”

  Lovely Lydia had a small Plexiglas bubble in the roof, designed for the navigator to use for observation, although Tommy preferred to climb into the nose. There was a small metal step that he used to push himself up into the bubble, and he took a quick glance behind them and saw huge black spirals of smoke rising from a half-dozen ships in the convoy and a massive red explosion from an oil tanker. But his attention to the success of their work was short-lived, for what he’d immediately seen had frightened him far more in that moment than anything in the bombing run—not the speed, not the scream of the engines, not the wall of bullets they’d passed through. What he saw was the unmistakable red-orange of flames shooting from the port engine, licking across the surface of the wing.

  He had screamed into the intercom: “Port side! Port side! Fire!”

  Only to hear the captain reply nonchalantly, “I know, they’re on fire, helluva job, bombardier. . . .”

  “No, damn it, captain, it’s us!”

  The flames were shooting out of the cowling, streaking the blue air, and black smoke was smudging the wind. We’re dead, Tommy had thought right then. In a second or two, or maybe five or ten, the flames will hit the fuel line and race back into the wing tank and we’ll explode.

  He had stopped being afraid at that moment. It was the rarest of sensations, to look out at something taking place just beyond his reach and recognize it for what it was—his own death. He felt a slight twinge of irritation, as if frustrated that there was nothing he could do, but resigned. And, in the same second, felt an odd, distant sort of loneliness and worried about his mother, and his brother, who was somewhere in the Pacific, and his sister and his sister’s best friend, who lived down the block from them back in Manchester and whom he loved with a painful, dogged intensity, and how they would all be hurt far worse and for far longer than he was about to be, because he knew the explosion that was about to overtake them would be quick and decisive. And into this reverie he’d heard the captain drawl one last time, “Hang on tight, boys, we’re gonna try for the water!” and Lovely Lydia started to dive down, reaching for the waves that were their only real chance, to dump themselves into the water and extinguish the fire before the plane exploded.

  It seemed to him that the world around him was screaming not words from memory, not sounds that belonged to the earth, but the crackling noise of some hellish circle of tormenting flame. He had always told himself that if they went into the drink, he would jam himself up behind the reinforced steel sled of the copilot’s seat, but he didn’t have time to get there. Instead, he hung desperately onto a ceiling pipe, riding into the blue of the Mediterranean ocean at nearly three hundred miles per hour, and looking for all the world in that terrifying moment like some nonchalant Manhattan commuter hanging from a subway train strap patiently waiting for his stop.

  In his bunk, he shivered again.

  He remembered: The sergeant in the turret screaming. Tommy had staggered a step toward the gunner because he’d known that the man was locked into his seat, and the safety catch wouldn’t release because the impact must have jammed it shut, and he was crying for help. But in that second, he had heard the captain yell to him, “Tommy, get out! Just get out! I’ll help the gunner!” There were no sounds from the others. The captain’s order was the last sound he’d heard from any of the crew of the Lovely Lydia. He’d been surprised that the side hatch had opened, and surprised again when his Mae West had actually worked, helping him to bob on the surface like a child’s cork toy. He’d paddled away from the plane, then turned back, waiting for the others to exit, but none had.

  He’d called out once: “Get out! Get out! Please get out!”

  And then he’d floated, waiting.

  After a few seconds, Lovely Lydia had abruptly pitched forward, nose down, an
d silently slid beneath the water’s surface, leaving him alone in the ocean.

  This had always disturbed him. The captain, the copilot, the bombardier, and both gunners, they had always seemed to him to be so much quicker and sharper than he was. They were all young and athletic, coordinated, and skilled. They were quick and efficient, good shots with a machine gun or a basketball, fast around the bases legging out an extra base rap, and he had always known they were the real warriors on the Lovely Lydia, while he’d always thought of himself as this silly bookworm student, a little thin, a little clumsy, but good with calculations and a slide rule, who had grown up staring at the stars in the sky above his Vermont home, and thus, more by accident than patriotic design, had become a navigator and was more or less along for the ride. He had thought of himself as merely a piece of equipment, an appendage on the flight, while they were the fliers and the killers and the real men of the battle.

  He did not understand why he had lived and all the men who’d seemed so much stronger than he had died.

  And so he’d floated alone on the sea for nearly twenty-four hours, salt water mingling with his tears, on the edge of delirium, swimming in despair, until an Italian fishing boat had plucked him from the waves. They were rough men who’d handled him with surprising gentleness. The fishermen had wrapped him in a blanket and given him a glass of red wine. He could still remember how it burned his throat as he drank. And when they came to shore, they had dutifully handed him over to the Germans.

  That was what had really happened. But in his dream the truth always evaporated, replaced instead by a much happier reality, where they were all alive, and gathered beneath the wing of the Lovely Lydia, trading jokes about the Arab merchants outside their dusty North African base, and boasting about what they would do with their lives and their girlfriends and wives when they got back to the States. He had sometimes thought, when they were still alive, that the men on the Lovely Lydia were the best friends he would ever have, and then sometimes thought that they would never see each other again, once the war was over. It had never really occurred to him that he would never see them again because they were all dead, and he was still alive, because this had never really seemed a possibility.

  In his bunk, he thought: They will be with me always.

  One of the prisoners in another bed shifted, the wooden slats creaking and obscuring the man’s words as he talked in his sleep, the noise dissolving into an almost girlish moaning sound.

  I lived and they died.

  He cursed often at his eyes, and how they’d betrayed them all by spotting that convoy. He thought incongruously that if only he’d been born stone blind, instead of blessed with especially acute eyesight, then they’d all still be alive. It did no good, he knew, to think like that. Instead, he vowed that if he survived the war, one day he would travel all the way across the country to West Texas, and after he arrived there, he would drive deep into the scrubland and arroyos of that harsh land and take up a rifle and begin to kill jackrabbits. Every jackrabbit he could spot. Every jackrabbit for miles around. He envisioned himself shooting dozens, hundreds, thousands, a great slaughter of rabbits. Killing jackrabbits until he fell to the earth exhausted, ammunition expended, the barrel of the rifle seared red hot. Surrounded by enough dead jackrabbits to last his captain an eternity.

  He knew he would not be able to fall back to sleep.

  So, he lay back, listening to the rain striking the metal roof and resounding like gunshots. And mixed in that sound came a low and distant thud. And moments later, shrill whistles and frantic shouts, all in the unmistakable angry German of the prison camp guards. He swung his feet out of the bunk and was pulling on his boots when he heard a pounding on the barracks door and “Raus! Raus! Schnell!” It would be cold on the parade ground, and Tommy Hart reached for his old leather flight jacket. The men around him were hurrying to dress, pulling on their woolen underwear and cracked and worn flight boots as the first insinuations of dawn light came filtering through the grimy barracks windows. In his hurry to get dressed, he lost sight of the Lovely Lydia and its crew, letting them fade into the near part of his memory as he quickly joined the flow of men heading out into the damp early morning chill of Stalag Luft Thirteen.

  Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart shuffled his feet in the light brown mud of the parade compound. The grumbling had started within a few minutes of the assembly—an Appell in German—and now, whenever a guard walked by, the men would begin to catcall, and complain.

  The Germans, for the most part, ignored them. Occasionally a Hundführer, with his snarling shepherd at his side, would turn at the groups of men, and make motions as if he were ready to let the dog loose, which had the intended effect of quieting the airmen, if only for a few minutes. Luftwaffe Oberst Edward Von Reiter, the camp commandant, had quick-marched past the formations hours earlier, pausing only when accosted by the Senior American Officer, Colonel Lewis MacNamara, who immediately launched into a series of rapid-fire complaints. Von Reiter listened to MacNamara for perhaps thirty seconds, then casually saluted, raising a riding crop to the brim of his cap, and gestured for the SAO to return to his position at the head of the blocks of men. Without another glance at the row of airmen, Von Reiter had disappeared in the direction of Hut 109.

  The kriegies mumbled and stamped their feet, as the day grew around them. Kriegies was what they called themselves, a shortening of the German Kriegsgefangene, which loosely translated into “war captured.” Standing, waiting, was both boring and exhausting. It was something they were familiar with, but hated.

  There were nearly ten thousand Allied prisoners of war held in the camp, split almost equally between two compounds, North and South. The U.S. fliers—all officers—were in the southern compound, while British and other Allies were situated to the North, a quarter mile away. Passage between the camps, while not unusual, was mildly difficult. An escort and an armed guard and a compelling reason were necessary. Of course, a compelling reason could be manufactured by the quick exchange of a couple of cigarettes passed to one of the ferrets, which was what the kriegies called the guards who roamed the camps, armed only with the swordlike steel probes they used to poke into the ground. The guards with the dogs were called by their official names, because the dogs scared everyone. There were no walls at the camp, but each of the compounds was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high fence. Two rows of barbed concertina wire on either side of a metal chain link. Every fifty yards along the fence was a stolid, squat wooden tower. These were manned around the clock by humorless and unbribable machine-gun crews, goons, with Schmeisser machine pistols hung around their necks.

  Ten feet inside the main fence the Germans had strung a thin strand of wire from wooden stakes. This was the deadline. Anyone crossing that line was assumed to be trying to escape, and would be shot. At least, that was what the Luftwaffe commandant told each prisoner upon arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen. The reality was that the guards would let a prisoner, who donned a white smock with a red cross prominently centered on it, pursue a baseball or football if it rolled to the exterior fence, although sometimes, for amusement, they would wave a prisoner after the item, then fire a short burst into the air above his head or into the dirt at his feet. Walking the deadline was a favorite kriegie activity; the airmen would pace endless laps at the limit of their confinement.

  The May sun rose rapidly, warming the faces of the men gathered on the parade ground. Tommy Hart guessed they had been standing in formation for nearly four hours, while steady processions of German officers and enlisted men had passed by, heading toward the collapsed tunnel. The enlisted men carried shovels and pickaxes. The officers wore frowns.

  “It’s the damn wood,” a voice from the formation spoke. “It gets wet, it gets rotten, won’t hold up a damn thing.”

  Tommy Hart turned and saw that the man speaking was a wiry West Virginian, copilot on a B-17, and a man whose father had grown up working in the coal mines. He’d presumed the West Virginian, whose flat voice t
wanged with disgust, was prominent in escape planning. Men with knowledge of the earth—farmers, miners, excavators, even a funeral home director shot down over France who lived in the next hut over—were enlisted in the efforts within hours of their arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen.

  He had made no efforts to escape the camp. Nor did he have any great desire to try, unlike many of the other men. It was not that he didn’t want to be free, which he did, but that he silently knew that in order to escape he would have to descend into a tunnel.

  And this he could not do.

  He supposed his fear of enclosed spaces came from the time he accidentally locked himself inside a basement closet when he was no more than four or five. A dozen terrifying hours spent enclosed in darkness, in heat and tears, hearing his mother’s distant voice calling to him yet unable to raise his own, he was so panicked. He probably would not have characterized the fear that remained with him from that day as claustrophobia, but that, in effect, was what it was. He’d joined the air corps at least in part because even in the tight confines of the bomber, he was still out in the open. The idea of being inside a tank or a submarine had been far more frightening to him than the fear of enemy bullets.

  So, in the oddly uncertain prison world of Stalag Luft Thirteen, Tommy Hart knew one thing: If he ever did get out, it would have to be through the front gate. Because he would never voluntarily descend into a tunnel.

  This made him think of himself as content—although that was probably not the right word, more willing or resigned—to wait for the end of the war despite the rigors of Stalag Luft Thirteen. He was occasionally enlisted as a stooge—to take up a position where he could keep an eye on one of the ferrets, an early warning system designed by the camp security officers. Any German walking within the camp was constantly followed and observed by a system of overlapping watchers, with redundant signaling methods. Of course, the ferrets knew they were being watched, and consequently tried their best to evade the security, constantly altering their routes, and their paths.