It was a bright day. Few clouds. Perfect visibility. Too bad he was in the midst of the stiffest anti-aircraft fire in all his twenty missions. The flak officer at the briefing that morning knew what he was talking about when he said that Berlin had the heaviest guns of the German cities.
Sergeant Art Tooney spun his ball turret back and forth. The bomb doors opened with a creak. He could clearly see the other bombers in the huge stream of hundreds, arranged in V’s, flights, squadrons, and groups. They were a solid overcast of bombers. Another Maximum Effort. Flanking the bombers, far out to the left and right, dots in the sky, were the escorting P-47 and P-51 fighters. He looked down and saw the streets in the Berlin suburbs over 20,000 feet below. He closed his eyes, wishing it was over. He swallowed hard. Then... one explosion shook Lucky Lady, belting him to the side.
Another explosion rocked the bomber.
That was close. Too close.
Tooney opened his eyes. A B-17 in the formation was going down, two engines smoking, tail plane shot away! White smoke meant loss of oil. One chute... two... Then another bomber took a hit. Black smoke this time. A fire. And then a third in the group to the rear, a giant dark hole in her fuselage. She was falling out of formation. Tooney swallowed, on the verge of vomiting. Panic infected him, then passed quickly... as if he had been slapped in the face. That’s not going to happen to us! Not us. We’re the lead ship of the mid-group. Hang in there, or she’s goodbye, Charlie.
Tension was the killer for Tooney. Staying alert, constantly searching the sky, was too much sometimes. On this mission, his oxygen mask had iced up, and his heated flying suit was not operating properly. Either it was too hot or too cold. Now it was too hot on the gloves, and was burning his fingers. Damn! It was not his day.
Over the intercom he could hear the bombardier instruct the pilot on the bomb run. “STEADY... STEADY... LEFT A BIT.”
Then the bomber shook violently.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” asked a voice.
“WE’VE BEEN HIT! NAVIGATOR TO PILOT. NUMBER TWO ENGINE ON FIRE!”
Tooney felt the bomber losing altitude. Oh no! Shit, no! Still, they remained on their bomb run.
“I SEE IT. RELAX. I’M SHUTTING IT DOWN. BOMBARDIER, HOW IS THAT TARGET?”
“I HAVE IT IN MY SIGHTS.”
“TELL ME WHEN. MAKE IT QUICK.”
“BAD CROSSWIND, SKIPPER.”
“CAN’T HELP IT.”
A long pause...
“NOW!”
“IT’S ALL YOURS. YOU HAVE THE AIRCRAFT.”
Tooney knew what was happening. On every bomb run, the bombardier, once he had the target through his eyepiece, would ask for control of the aircraft. In essence, he was flying the bomber, although only for a short time, until he dropped the payload. The plane had to stay level, unable to dodge the flak.
Another long pause... an eternity to Tooney... waiting for those magic words from the navigator.
“BOMBS GONE! LET’S GET OUTTA HERE!”
Tooney felt Lucky Lady jerk upwards, free of four-thousand-pounds of explosives. He stared below to watch the bombs descend. Part-way down, they meshed in with the other bombs from the formation. Then... he saw the flashing rings of destruction as each bomb collided with the earth. One... two... three... Within seconds, too many, too fast to count. Dark, billowing smoke began to rise. By the time the formation banked left to return to England, Tooney wondered what it was like for someone caught in the midst of all that hell on earth down below.
It took most of the week to get the package together that Erickson had promised. McCreedy and Hollinger studied the blueprints and miscellaneous folders relating to the German secret weapons at a round table in Hollinger’s room, while Johanna Erickson looked on. Before their eyes were the diagrams and formulas for missiles of short-range and long-range variety, new jet fighters, revolutionary hand weapons called lasers, drawings of night-vision goggles... there was no end to it. Hollinger was especially fascinated by the V-2, the supersonic rocket that had been devastating parts of London.
“What do you say now, Mr. Hollinger?” she said, standing over them.
Hollinger was speechless.
“We’re impressed, to say the least, by the weaponry,” McCreedy said in his Virginian drawl, adjusting his glasses.
Erickson folded her arms over her white, silk blouse. She was smartly-dressed in business attire, black skirt and matching jacket. “I thought so.”
“We didn’t realize that the Germans were this advanced,” Hollinger said, finding his tongue, holding some of the files. “Not by a long shot. These concentration camp photos are most disturbing.” He saw scrawny prisoners with pathetic faces, dressed in mere rags, peering through a barbwire fence. “You say Heinrich Himmler is responsible for this?”
“According to Bormann’s sources, yes.”
“Jews?”
“Yes. An elimination of a race is what it is. “
“Awful. There’s going to be hell to pay for this.”
“Do we still have a deal?”
“Yes,” Hollinger replied, glancing at McCreedy beside him, “except for one, tiny little detail.”
“That is?” Erickson wondered.
“There’s no paperwork for the Foo Fighter.”
“The which?”
Hollinger stood to face the pretty Erickson. They locked eyes. “The Foo Fighter.”
“Never heard of it,” she said.
“We have. Why isn’t it in here?”
“I don’t know. I repeat, I’ve never heard of it.”
“Tell Bormann we’re not talking unless we include the Foo Fighter.”
Erickson sighed, heavily. “I will. But he won’t like it. You must consider one thing. It is very risky to send more paperwork through the lines, if there is such a machine as this Foo Fighter.”
“There is.”
“Very risky. It could fall into the wrong hands. We’ve been getting away with it so far, but—”
“Then tell Bormann to think of something, because we want the Foo Fighter.”
If it wasn’t for the escorting P-51 fighter, Tooney’s crew would be in terrible trouble. Over enemy territory, with one engine out, prop feathered, the bomber pilot was doing all he could to keep Lucky Lady at 10,000 feet. But it was no use. They were still ten minutes from the German coast, and the North Sea.
The cloud was increasing now. Tooney looked over at the P-51 pilot easing alongside the bomber, twenty yards to port. Tooney waved. The pilot waved back, thumbs up. Tooney turned the turret aft. Suddenly... blasting out of the clouds came one of those weird fighters again. Tooney got a good look at it this time, as it flew by on a parallel course. Tooney warned his pilot over the intercom and cocked his guns, bearing down on the target. He got away some shots, but they went wild.
The P-51 pilot broke off and gave chase.
Now there were more of the weird fighters. Two... three... four...
Tooney stabbed at his intercom switch. “BALL GUNNER TO PILOT!”
“WHAT IS IT?” answered the voice of discipline.
“FOO FIGHTERS, SIR. FOUR OF THEM THIS TIME. SIX O’CLOCK LEVEL.”
Tooney watched in horror as one of them tucked in close and fired something resembling a red beam at one of the starboard engines. Then it broke off.
“NUMBER ONE ENGINE ON FIRE,” the pilot said, calmly.
“NORTH SEA BELOW, SIR,” announced the navigator.
Tooney felt the stricken aircraft nosing down even more steeply. He whirred completely around in his turret. The Foo Fighters were gone as quickly as they had arrived on the scene! Thank God!
“PILOT TO CREW. WE HAVE TO JETTISON EVERYTHING WE CAN. PILOT TO BALL GUNNER. GET OUT OF YOUR TURRET, SERGEANT. RIGHT NOW!”
“GOT YOU, SKIPPER.” Tooney unhooked his oxygen and heater wires and turned the ball down to line up the turret with the opening to the mid-section of the aircraft. The door cranked open, and there to help Tooney out was the left-waist gunner, the right-waist gunner standing alongside.
Tooney looked around at the grim faces of the gunners. “Where’s Henderson?” he asked them, making a move towards the aft section.
He was stopped by a stiff hand on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t go back there, if I were you,” said the left gunner.
“Why not?”
“Because... because... Henderson bought it,” the right gunner answered.
“How? When?”
“On the bomb run. Flak blew his head off.”
“Shit!” Tooney gulped. “Let’s get to work, I guess.”
The crew shed everything they could out the hatches — guns, ammunition, sidearms, flak suits. And they still were losing altitude. The co-pilot scrambled to the waist-section, and met up with the gunners. The slipstream blasted by the two open waist windows. “The skipper wants us to get rid of the ball!” he yelled to be heard.
The gunners looked at each other, numbed.
“Do it!” the co-pilot screamed at them. “I’ll help. Where do you keep the tool kit?”
The right-waist gunner unclipped the wrenches from the side of the fuselage. They started the process by loosening the four large bolts on the ball. They took turns, five of them. It was exhausting work. Pulling the bolts off, they removed the ring gear, then knocked off the four safety hangars. They all breathed a sigh. But there was more to go — twelve small bolts, three in each corner.
“Move it!” the co-pilot blared, assisting the men. “We’re still in a dive!”
They continued to work quickly and methodically, trying not to think of the gradual, yet dangerous descent of the bomber. When the last bolt popped off, twenty minutes after starting the whole procedure, the men stared in disbelief. The ball should have just fallen free, but didn’t.
“Jump on it!” Tooney said.
“Yeah, you jump on it!” the tail gunner answered.
“OK, I will. But you guys hang onto me, just in case I slip through.”
“Right.”
The two waist gunners grabbed Tooney as he banged down twice on the ball with his boots.
Nothing happened.
“Again,” said the co-pilot.
Tooney jumped once more.
This time the turret let go with a giant whoosh! The men tumbled backwards. Then, one at a time, they eased forward to the gigantic hole to watch the one-thousand-pound-plus ball turret head to the water.
There it goes, thought Tooney. My best seat in the house.
“We did it!” the co-pilot screamed, looking around, the slipstream thundering through the new space. “Hey, I think we’re levelling off! We’re going to make it!”