The funeral was as bad as she’d expected. They buried Andy in a closed coffin, which meant the undertaker hadn’t been able to make him presentable. Behind black veiling, Penny Mamedoff looked shattered. A.E. wondered what Andy would think of spending eternity in an Anglican churchyard. Since he’d happily got married in an Anglican church, chances were he wouldn’t mind.
Along with the Office for the Dead, the minister read a sonnet called “High Flight.”
“The author, Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., is one of Flying Officer Mamedoff’s fellow Eagles,” he said. A.E. had seen the poem before; it got widely printed in papers and magazines. She didn’t think Pilot Officer Magee would put Shakespeare on the bread line any time soon, but she appreciated the sentiment.
And the war ground on. As weather worsened, flying time went down. On one patrol, she spotted a 109 with a bomb slung under its belly. But its pilot spied her, too. He dumped the bomb in the Channel and got the hell out of there. She decided to count herself lucky. If he’d decided to fight it out, an unencumbered 109 was a match for a Spitfire.
She was going in to dinner on a cold Sunday evening when another pilot came running up behind her shouting, “Holy jumping Jesus, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor—I just heard it on the radio!”
“Oh, my God!” somebody else exclaimed. “The USA’s finally in the war for real!”
All through the meal, the men gabbled excitedly about how the Eagle Squadrons were bound to get folded into the US Army Air Force sooner than soon. A.E. ate without trying to argue with them.
For one thing, though Japan had attacked the United States, Germany hadn’t, not really. Could FDR get Congress to declare war on the Nazis anyway? For another … If the States did get into the European war, she thought the Eagles had it straight. The USA would incorporate them into its forces. Them, yes. But her? England had been desperate, fearing the first successful invasion since 1066, but even then she’d had to browbeat the RAF into conceding that, yes, in this terrible emergency she might possibly make a combat pilot.
America wouldn’t be like that. She knew her own, her native land, much too well. The United States would set up as many training stations as it thought it needed, plus several dozen more for luck. Pilots would flow out of them in a steady stream and then, as things got rolling, in a flood. And every damn one of those pilots would be a man.
Women who already flew? They might let them ferry planes around, as the British did. They might even train some more. That would let them throw men into battle, where men belonged.
What about a woman who’d already flown in combat? What about a woman who had, in fact, flown when things looked worst? What about a woman who’d shot down three Nazi planes?
They wouldn’t have any idea what to do with her. A.E. could feel that coming like a rash. When she was flying around the world, she’d seen mudskippers near Singapore—little fish that climbed up on tree roots and mudflats and scooted along with their stiff front fins. That’s what she would seem like to the American authorities: something out of its proper element.
They’d win the war without her. She was sure of that. And she was sure as sure could be that they wouldn’t want to win the war with her.
“Hey, Earhart!” said Bill Geiger, a kid who’d been with 71 Squadron from the get-go. “You aren’t talking much. What do you think of all this?”
“We’re going to kick the snot out of Japan. If we get into the fight with the Nazis, we’ll kick the snot out of Germany, too. We’ll probably need a little while to get going, but we’ll do it,” she answered.
That met with general approval. It seemed obvious to A.E. Geiger went on, “Won’t it be great, flying under the Stars and Stripes?”
She was slower to reply this time. After a beat, she said, “They’ll want men with experience—you bet they will. They won’t have anybody who’s flown in combat except a few old guys who flew biplanes in 1918.”
Bill Geiger laughed the heartless laugh of youth. He might not have been born in 1918. “Those fellas won’t know much about how we do it now.”
This time, she got away with not saying anything. She remembered the RAF sergeant-pilot who’d trained her at Croydon. He’d known what he was doing, all right. The planes changed. What you did with them? Rather less.
When the United States declared war on Japan but not on Germany, A.E. wondered whether Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t thought Congress would approve fighting Hitler and his gang of thugs. As far as she could see, that was a judgment on Congress, if not on America as a whole.
But it turned out not to matter. Four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the USA. Like it or not, America was in the European fight up to its eyebrows. A.E. wondered what isolationist, America First Charles Lindbergh thought of that. As far as she could tell from the London papers and the BBC, he was keeping very quiet. After he’d spent so long making a pro-German jerk of himself, that had to be the smartest thing he could do.
A couple of days later, she ran across a back-page story in the Times of London. EAGLE LOST IN TRAINING ACCIDENT, the headline said. A Spitfire flown by an American pilot officer called John G. Magee had collided with another plane on a training flight. Both went down, and both pilots perished.
She scratched her head, wondering why the name seemed familiar. She didn’t think she knew anyone called John G. Magee, but still … Then she remembered. He was the poet who’d written “High Flight,” the piece the minister read out at Andy Mamedoff’s funeral.
The last sentence of the little story read Pilot Officer Magee was nineteen years of age at the time of his death. A.E. looked at that for a long time. Of course, lots of nineteen-year-olds were dying in horrible ways around the world right now. Having this one pointed out made her feel it more, though. So did his being an American, and a talented one.
“‘Put out my hand and touched the face of God,’” she murmured, remembering the sonnet’s final line. God had touched John Magee now, and he wouldn’t need any more touches after this.
“What did you say?” asked another Yank in the officers’ mess.
She repeated the line, louder this time, and added, “Remember Andy’s funeral? They read the poem there. The fellow who wrote it just died in a crash. He was nineteen.”
“Ah, hell. That stinks. That really stinks,” the other pilot said, and then picked up his teacup again. Not much more than nineteen himself, he was hardened to death. If you were going to fly fighters, you needed to be. Anything that could happen could happen to you. Sooner or later—likely sooner—it would.
A.E. glanced at the story again. The accident had happened on December 11, the day the Nazis officially went to war with the United States. John Magee had done what he could. Others would carry on.
Every time she flew a Rhubarb mission into France, she thought of Red Tobin. Word had come back through the International Red Cross that he was dead. There was even a photo of the grave where the Germans buried him. Like the English, they were polite to the remains of flyers they’d killed.
She was one of the leaders in a finger-four now. More often than not, Bill Geiger flew as her wingman. “Just don’t do anything silly and we’ll be fine,” she told him. “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.”
“Gotcha,” he said, nodding in what she hoped was wisdom. Christ, he was young, though. She really could have been his mother.
Winter weather gave the raiders lots of clouds they could duck into if they ran into trouble. Coming out of the clouds where they wanted to was the tricky part. A.E. remembered Andy Mamedoff, too. But all she could do was all she could do. And by now she knew a lot more about navigation than she had when Fred Noonan did it for her on her round-the-world jaunt.
Still, even she was more than a little amazed when her finger-four came out from under the cloud cover right above one of the Nazi air bases near Calais. Several Focke-Wulf 190s stood on or by the runway. Those new German fighters worried her worse than 109s. By the reports, they were more than a match even for the new Spits: fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed, while their air-cooled radial engines could soak up a lot of damage without quitting.
But they were down there, and she and her friends were up here. “Let’s give them some,” she said over the radio. She shoved the stick forward to bring down her Spitfire’s nose. The others dove with her.
They made two or three passes over the field, shooting up planes and huts. Two of the 190s were on fire when they zoomed north again. The rest would certainly need patching up before going into action again.
Everybody came back to North Weald in one piece, which was the way things were supposed to work even if too often they didn’t. “Nice job, Bill,” she said. “Good to know things can go according to Hoyle every once in a while, isn’t it?”
“You better believe it!” Geiger answered. “Good to shoot at things without anybody shooting back, too.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “yes.”
She went in to brief Flight Lieutenant Taylor on the raid. “Way to go,” he said when she finished. “The fewer of those F-Ws the Nazis can put in the air, the happier I am. They’re supposed to be very bad news.”
“I was thinking the same thing, sir.” Having said what she had to say, A.E. turned to leave.
“Hold on a minute,” Taylor told her. He reached behind him and grabbed a manila envelope. “This came through for you. Go ahead—open it.”
Open it she did, and pulled out a sheet of paper. Holding the sheet at arm’s length—yes, her sight was lengthening, not a bad thing in the air but not a good one without reading glasses—she saw it was a letter on RAF stationery, informing her she had been promoted to flying officer and signed (no doubt much to his disgust) by Sholto Douglas.
As a pilot officer, she wore on each uniform sleeve a skinny, black-bordered stripe of sky blue. A flying officer wore a fatter sky-blue stripe. Her new rank emblems were in the envelope, too.
“Thank you very much, sir!” she exclaimed, but couldn’t help adding, “I never expected this would come through.”
“You should’ve got it a long time ago, if anyone wants to know what I think,” Taylor said. As a flight lieutenant, he gloried in two stripes like her new ones on each sleeve. “You’ve done everything anyone could ask of you and more. The other pilots think you’re great. If you were a man, you’d outrank me by now.”
She shrugged, remembering Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory’s unwillingness to take her into the RAF at all, Flight Lieutenant Darley asking her to cook for 609 Squadron … and that attempted assault in the dark. She also remembered Andy Mamedoff, on getting promoted ahead of her, saying almost the same thing Taylor just had. Poor Andy!
“Sir, things are the way they are, that’s all,” she said. “They’re still a long way from how they ought to be. But I’m here. That pushes them a little closer, anyway.”
“That’s the right attitude, for sure.” Taylor cocked an eyebrow at her. “If you didn’t have that kind of attitude, you’d be screaming by now.”
“I keep telling myself I’m fighting on the right side,” she answered. “We’re making things better, not worse like the Nazis. Two steps forward and one step back, but we are. Maybe I’m part of a forward step. I hope so, anyway.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score. Congratulations again,” Taylor said. She was smiling as she went to her cot to sew the new stripes onto her jacket sleeves. The squadron CO actually got it. One of these days, with a little luck, men wouldn’t need to get it. They’d take it for granted. The smile faded. She didn’t think she’d better hold her breath waiting.