CHAPTER ELEVEN
TWELVE O’CLOCK
HIGH

Savage became wide awake during the two seconds it took him to reach out, in the dark, and turn off the clangor of his alarm clock. The luminous hands pointed to two-fifteen.

In the next bed, Ben Gately sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Here we go again”, he said, drowsily.

“I sure hope so”, said Savage.

He walked over to an open window and stared through the blackout, but it was too early for any omens of weather. He then closed the blackout curtains and switched on the lights.

“I thought I saw a couple of stars through the mist”, he said. “But I’m not sure.” “Maybe the stuff is thin”, said Gately. “It’ll probably burn off later.”

The two men began to get dressed in silence, each permeated with that inner flood of excitement peculiar to the morning of any scheduled mission. However, this was extra special.

The Big Show had been laid on at last. Today, if only the weather forecast held true, they would go.

“You know, General”, said Gately, reaching for his pants, “I’ve been awake for awhile - and been lying here thinking.”

“I can’t think until I’ve had my coffee”, remarked Savage, yawning.

“Maybe I do too much thinking”, said Gately, hesitantly. “Ever since this show started, I’ve been trying to sell myself on it. It seems as though, for a hundred years, I’ve been getting up in the blackout, like this, and taking off for somewhere with a load of bombs.”

He paused.

“Do you have to sell yourself on it?” “No”, replied Savage.

Gately waited a moment, but the general didn’t amplify his statement.

“Well”, continued Gately. “There’s one thing I am sold on, General, and that’s when this is all over, after the brains and skill and lives that have gone into it, somebody at the top has got to figure out a better way to run the world - without dictators, and armies, and secret weapons.”

He lit a cigarette.

“I know one thing, for sure. If there’s still any need for an army after this war, old man Gately isn’t going to be in it. You’ll find me in a pinstripe suit, running for Congress, and I’m going to have my say.”

“Me”, said Savage. “I’m thinking about getting the war won first, before I start sweating about the state of the world.”

Savage had started his ritual of mission preparation by taking out a fresh, clean pair of G.I. long- handled, winter underwear. As he donned the underwear, the clean wool came into contact with his clean skin, because he had scrubbed himself thoroughly, in a hot bath, before going to bed. A little thing, but important. And he had seen to it, through the Flight Surgeon, that all combat crews understood the necessity, in the interest of safety, of good personal hygiene.

You needed fresh underwear to absorb pre-take-off moisture, before the climb to North Pole temperatures. And, even more important, to reduce the danger of infecting wounds opened from flak and cannon shells.

Next, he powered his feet, copiously, and slid on a pair of silk socks, following them with an outside pair of heavy cotton socks. Then he put his feet into a pair of muddied, heavy-duty, G.I. en- listedman’s, broad-toed shoes. If a man got shot down, he might have to walk hundreds of miles to escape. Without heavy-duty shoes, he might pull up lame in fifty miles, or, if the shoes were shined, or noticeably different from those worn by common European folks, he would invite suspicion and possibly capture.

Then, he climbed into a pair of light weight flying coveralls, preferring them to the bulky winter flying clothes. Temperatures in the cockpit were not so dangerously low, even if the heaters failed. And if, for any reason, he had to leave the cockpit temp- orarily, to assist in some more frigid part of the airplane, Savage preferred to be unencumbered.

But, at best, it was a compromised that irritated him whenever he thought of the delays that had deprived the crews, thus far, of light weight, electrically heated flying suits, shoes, and gloves,

that could be depended on to work properly.

After rolling his sleeves up, above his elbows, he zipped the coveralls up the front, so as to leave the neck open for coolness while on the ground. Then, he went to his washbasin and gave his face a final once-over with a new razor blade, out of defer- ence to the torment that would surely result from wearing a tight oxygen mask, chafing against unshaven whiskers.

Next, he lifted his kit bag onto the bed and emptied out its contents, and, as he did so, he crossed each item off a mental checklist. A “Mae West” life preserver, a parachute harness and chest pack parachute, an oxygen mask, a throat microphone, a pair of fur-lined gloves, a silk scarf, and a small chart board with large clips, on which to mount his maps and mission data.

Then, he checked the inflation cartridges of the “Mae West”, and insured that the handles were properly safetied. And finally, he opened the cover flap of the chest pack, to see that the seal had not been broken, or the copper safety wire, leading to the ripcord handle.

Savage and Gately, who had basically followed the same pro- cedure, were now ready, even though barely twenty minutes had passed since the alarm clock went off. To both men, as with most of the combat crews, this pre-mission routine of meticulous atten- tion to detail, had long ago become second nature.

While Savage had been equipping himself, outwardly, for the job ahead, inwardly, his mind was undergoing a familiar process of preparation. He counted over a score of important details on his mental fingertips - like Joe Cobb.

He must remember to tell Cobb to fly the low squadron a bit farther forward than usual, today. In addition to miscellaneous items such as this, all of which could be forgotten tomorrow, but any one of which might be a matter of life and death today, his mind held a photographic copy of a mass of details bearing on the mission.

Details of the route, headings, positions of other Groups, call signs, control times, navigation check points, flak areas, fighter escort plans, and weather data. There might, or might not, be time, in an emergency, to dig these things out from his written data. Like other experienced Group Commanders, once a Field Order began clicking out of the teletype machine, Savage had learned the trick of converting his brain tissue into a sheet of car- bon-copy paper.

But, beneath all of these things, he was experiencing the most vital part of his personal preparation. He was enclosing himself in his psychological armor. To some extent it was always there, had always been there, while he was in command of a combat unit. But before every mission, it required an extra thickness and hardness, shielding him with a profound sense of confidence.

Each time, this conditioning left him devoid of fear or weak- ness, when he faced his crews at Briefing. And this morning, he knew, he would need every last particle of strength of mind, and heart, he could muster. Because, this time, he was leading eleven Groups - the second strike force of the Eighth Air Force - to Hambrucken.

Two hundred and forty combat crew members strained for- ward in their seats, soaking up every scrap of information during the crackling tension of the long Briefing. When Savage stood to speak, at the end, he could have heard a rubber oxygen mask hit the floor.

“Gentlemen”, he began, “if you destroy this target today, you destroy nearly half of the ball bearings that go into FWs and Me- 109s. You fellows know what that means to you personally.”

There were a few hollow laughs.

“Furthermore”, he continued, “this is the most vital target we have ever gone after. And it is appropriate that we attack it to- day, on the anniversary of the first mission flown by the Eighth Air Force.

As most of you know, that mission had a maximum effort of twelve B-17s. Today, we’re going to put thirty times that number of heavies into the air, half to Hambrucken and half to Bonhofen, both of them deep in the guts of the Third Reich.”

Savage was interrupted by a scattering of hand claps, initiated by Gately and Cobb, which snowballed into cheers, and finally an ovation. For not a man in the room was ignorant of the fact that Savage had led that first mission.

“Thanks”, he said, trying to hold his voice steady. “Thanks to all of you. But you had better save the cheering for tonight.”

His face brightened into the kind of smile he might have worn if all of them had been going to a ball game.

“Good luck to all of you”, he simply said, and then he jumped down from the platform. After the crews had begun to file out, Savage walked over to complimented the Intelligence Officer on his excellent briefing.

Then he led him over to the wall map.

“I’ve always been curious about these P.o.W. camps”, he said. “Do you happen to know where Luftstalag Nine is?”

“Yes, sir. Right about here”, said the officer, pointing to a spot on the map. “Almost twelve miles north of your course today.”

The general studied the location carefully. “Thank you, Captain”, he said.

“Yes, sir.”

At 5:30 A.M., fifteen minutes before taxi time, a jeep drove around the five mile perimeter track, in the semi-darkness. It paused at each dispersal point long enough to notify the waiting crews that poor local visibility would postpone the take-off for an hour.

Savage, sitting in the grass with his co-pilot, Rexall, received the news with a scowl. Timing, he knew, was everything Suppose the weather permitted the other strike force, whose bases were in East Anglia, to get off on schedule? An hour’s delay for his own force would give the enemy fighters plenty of time to reform between thrusts.

“Notify me immediately”, he said to the officer in the jeep, “when the Bonhofen air division takes off.”

The minutes crept by painfully slow. Rexall got up and gave the Piccadilly Lily another once-over, with special attention to the oxygen system - human fuel, as important for this mission, he knew, as aviation fuel was for the aircraft.

The gunners field-stripped their fifty calipers again, and oiled the bolts. Master Sergeant McIllhenny lay in the grass with his head on his parachute, feigning sleep, sweating out his fourth start.

Forty-five minutes later, the jeep drove up at a high speed and advised Savage that the Bonhofen force had just taken off. But, what was worse, was when the 918th received an order for a fur- ther postponement of an hour, Savage lost his temper.

Calling for McIllhenny, he got into his car, drove to his office and waited impatiently while Colonel Stovall tried to place a call through to General Henderson. Gately came in.

“Hell, General”, he exclaimed, “they’ve got to scrub us. In another half-hour all of southern England will be fogged in . . .

and none of our fighter escorts will be able to take off.”

“I know, Ben, I know . . . I’m trying to get Henderson now.”

With growing impatience, Savage waited for over ten minutes before Stovall succeeded it getting through to PINETREE. Grab- bing his phone, Savage asked.

“Well, how about it, Ed . . . are we scrubbing it . . .? What’s that . . .? But damnit, Ed, the timing’s all shot to hell. Surprise is out the window. The plan has failed!”

He paused to listen longer.

“Do you really mean that . . .? Okay . . . Roger that.”

Wearily he hung up the phone. Then, turning to Gately and Stovall, he said.

“It’s still on. Henderson said that there’s still a chance our fighter escort will be able to get off. And maybe the Germans will get too badly scattered in the first show, to meet us in any strength.”

He throttled his urge to express his own opinions.

“So, come on, Ben”, he added. “We’d better get back to our ships.”

At the hard-stand, Savage began looking at his watch two or three times a minute, burning up valuable energy in his frantic anxiety to get started, before it was too late. Every fifteen min- utes of postponement meant just that many more cannon shells waiting for his crews.

A few minutes before the revised start-engines time, his eyes lighted up when he saw the jeep approaching, once more. But his hopes plummeted as soon as he saw the Operations Officer’s expression.

“Set back another hour, sir”, said the captain.

Savage threw down his cigar and stomped on it with his heel. Once more he drove back to his headquarters and, again, Stovall struggled to get a free circuit to PINETREE, without any success.

“I’m afraid, sir, that every Group and Wing Commander in the Air Division is trying to get hold of General Henderson at the same time”, said Stovall.

“I know damn well they are, Harvey”, responded Savage, as he stood up, looking at his watch. Just then, a clerk hurried out of the Adjutant’s office.

“A long distance call for you, General. From Lowestoft.” “I’ll take it”, said Savage, hurrying back to his desk.

Pamela was on the other end, and her voice sounded urgent. “Frank”, she said, “I’ve got to talk in the clear. Can you hear me?” “Shoot”, he said.

“Frank . . . Captain Heeley is on his way to PINETREE with the intercepts. But he may be too late. You’ve got to scrub!”

“Give it to me as fast as you can, Pam!”

“The Germans are putting up everything in Germany against your first strike. Most of their fighters have already landed, re- fueled and rearmed. They’re sitting on their airfields all along your whole route . . . waiting. Waiting for your other people to come back out. You’re going to run right into an ambush, Frank. It’s suicidal. You’ve got to scrub!”

“Bless you, Pam. Good-bye!”

He slammed down the receiver and sprinted out to his car. And McIllhenny set a new record from Archbury to PINETREE.

Anticipating, correctly, that Henderson would be in the brand new underground Ops Block up on Daws Hill, Savage left his car at the entrance to the tunnel and rushed along the subterranean corridors, until he came to Henderson in the Ops room.

“Is it still on”, he asked, without any preliminaries, and brea- thing hard? Henderson just glared at him, while passing a hand through his rumpled hair. “Yes it is”, he said. “And what are you doing here, Frank?”

“I got a call from the R.A.F., about the latest RT-Intercepts. Do you have them?” “No! But I’ll have them soon.”

Savage quickly repeated what Pamela had told him. And, while Henderson showed his alarm at the intelligence, he showed his annoyance even more.

“There will be no more postponements”, he said, firmly. “In forty minutes we go. So you’d better start back, now.”

“But, Ed! You can’t mean that! They’re laying in wait for us, right now! We’ll catch hell, going in and coming out!”

“Look, Frank. I’m sick and tired of having everybody trying to talk me out of this strike. They’ll go!”

“Why? Just to celebrate an anniversary? To buy a lousy head- line with blood?”

“YES”, roared Henderson, with more conviction than Savage had ever seen in the man. “Exactly! To buy a headline we need! To buy the politicians! To buy the skeptics who don’t believe that we’ve got the stuff to hit a tough target in spite of hell! To buy the airplanes that the pressure groups want to send some- where else, if we let a thin fog stop us from hitting the most im- portant target they ever gave us! Now do you understand?”

Ignoring the question and calling on every bit of persuasive- ness at his command, Savage stepped closer to Henderson.

“Thin fog”, he said! “That’s a load of crap! It’s thick enough so that we’ll need jeeps with spotlights just to find the end of the runway for us! It’s thick enough to cost us a bunch of aircraft colliding in the soup, before we even get assembled!”

“You’re exaggerating”, claimed Henderson.

“Am I? You’ve already scrubbed this show twice when the weather was better than today’s!

Hambrucken will keep . . . until another day, and better weather! Ed, it’s a foolhardy waste of men and planes! And for what? Is an anniversary, or another star, worth that to you?”

“General Savage, there are a lot of things that you don’t know about! And I still make the decisions around here! And I don’t give a goddamn what you think! They’ll GO this morning . . . . even if we don’t get one airplane back.”

Savage held Henderson’s gaze for a long moment. His reply consisted of only two words. But they were the two words which win wars.

“Yes, Sir”, he said, in a voice like ice.

It’s brakes squealing, as the B-17 crept along the perimeter track, in fits and starts. Savage glued his eyes to the red halo of light, on the back of the jeep, a few feet in front of the aircraft’s nose.

The red light was all that he could see, through the dense fog,

which had rolled in over Archbury Field. Cursing the delay, in- wardly, he sweated out the slow journey to the head of the run- way, and hoped that a wheel wouldn’t roll off the edge of the narrow strip, and mire his ship in the mud.

When the driver of the jeep had lined him up on the correct heading of the runway, only twenty yards of which Savage could see in front of him, he run up his engines and then focused his gaze on the Directional Gyro. Gradually, he advanced the four throttles, until their manifold pressures were exactly equal, and then released the brakes.

Rolling forward and gathering speed, he held the needle in the Gyro on dead center using the rudder pedals, and completed his instrument take-off without seeing the ground. Climbing slowly on instruments, he wondered, in the back of his mind, how many B-17s from other nearby bases were milling around, fighting with him for the same piece of sky.

The LaGuardia Airport control tower would have its hands full, if a score of transports were stacked up over the field, at one thousand foot intervals. Savage wondered, how would they like having a couple of hundred aircraft at unknown altitudes, over- loaded with bombs and fuel, crowding the sky in their immediate vicinity?

He recollected the helpless moments he had spent in the Arch- bury control tower, listening to the desperate calls of a young pilot, caught just after a take-off, on instruments, with the most dreaded of emergencies - the failure of an engine from a runaway prop or turbo. Fifty feet off the ground, too heavy to climb, and unable to land, the pilot’s dilemma was classic - and often fatal.

At 0900 hours, heaving a sigh of relief, Savage’s plane broke out of the cloud tops, and into the glare of the sun. Beneath the Piccadilly Lily, the fields of England lay blanketed in the, now, undercast, from which many other B-17s were surfacing and from which a few, colliding in mid-air, never emerged.

The Lily continued to climb slowly, her broad wings should- ering a heavy load of incendiary bombs in the bomb bay, and a burden of fuel in the main and wingtip tanks that would keep her in the thin air, of the upper altitudes, for many hours. From his window on the left hand side of the cockpit, Savage anxiously watched the white surface of the undercast where his pilots were puncturing the cloud deck, rising clear of the mist with their Plexiglas tipped noses slanted upward, for the long climb to the base altitude.

The general had a green-red flare fired that identified him to Cobb, of the low squadron, and to Gately, of the high squadron. Five Fortresses had already tacked onto Savage, to form the lead squadron, and soon Cobb pulled into position with his cluster of six, with Gately joining up with his clutch of nine. The Group was now assembled, and intact.

The skies over England grew heavy with the weight of thous- ands of tons of bombs, fuel, men, and machines being lifted four miles up on a giant aerial hoist, to the western terminus of a twenty thousand foot elevated highway that led east, to Hambruc- ken. At intervals, arcs of sputtering red, green or yellow flares shot across the deep blue backdrop, as Group Leaders identified themselves to Wing Leaders.

For nearly an hour, while still above the English landscape, the bombers climbed, nursing their straining Cyclone engines in a three hundred foot-per-minute ascent. Gradually, they formed the three squadrons into a compact group of staggered formations - the low squadron down and to the left, and the high squadron up and to the right of the lead squadron.

Groups assembled into looser Combat Wings of three Groups each, along the Combat-Wing assembly line, homing in over pre- assigned splasher beacons by radio compass. Then finally, they cruised along the Air-Division assembly line, to allow the Com- bat Wings to fall into place, in trail, behind Savage’s lead Group.

Formed up at last, with each flanking Group in place, one thousand feet above or below its lead Group, Savage’s fifteen mile long parade moved eastward, toward Lowestoft, the point of departure from the friendly coast. He looked down for one last glimpse of Lowestoft, a speck on the curving coast line of another world, and gave a little wave of his gloved hand.

Unwieldy, but too dangerous for fighters to fool with, the bomber stream moved with stately purpose, out across the North Sea. In the co-pilot’s seat of one of the last B-17s in the long procession, General Ed Henderson watched the spectacle with the breathless suspense of a man on only his second combat mission, coupled with the knowledge of backing a terrible gamble with his own life.

From Henderson’s perch, the task force resembled huge, anvil -shaped, swarms of locusts. Not on dress parade, like the bomb- ers of the Luftwaffe that died in droves over Britain in 1940, but deployed to uncover every gun, and to permit maneuverability.

The English Channel and the North Sea glistened brightly, in the clear visibility, as the 918th left the bulge of East Anglia behind. Savage knew that his force was already registering on the German’s radar, and that the fighter controllers of the Luft- waffe were busy alerting their Staffeln of Messerschmitts and Focke Wulfs.

He stole a quick glance back at the cloud covered English countryside, hoping to see some sign of friendly fighters on their way to the rendezvous. But all he could pick out were a dozen or so B-17s, which had followed the strike force to fill in for any aborts from mechanical failures in the hard climb, heading for home.

Savage fastened his oxygen mask a little tighter and looked at the gauge, on the instrument panel, that indicated a proper oxy- gen flow. It was opening and closing, like a visual heartbeat, registering normal as he breathed.

Back in the rear of the aircraft, the gunners were already sear- ching for enemy fighters and, occasionally, the ship shivered as their guns were tested with short bursts. Savage could also see puffs of blue smoke from Cobb’s squadron, close below him, as each gunner satisfied himself that he had lead poisoning at his trigger finger tips.

As the coast of Holland appeared, in sharp black outline, he drew in a deep breath of oxygen, consulted his map, and saw that his navigator was going to hit the enemy coast, right on the nose. At 1108 hours, Savage’s aircraft crossed into Holland, south of The Hague. Near Woensdrecht, at 1117, he saw the first flak, in his vicinity, blossom out. It was light and inaccurate.

A few minutes later, McIllhenny called out, from his waistgun position. “Bandits at ten o’clock, and low.”

Savage saw them, climbing above the horizon, ahead of him and to the left - a pair of them. For a moment he hoped that they were P-47 “Thunderbolts”, from the missing escort, but he didn’t hope long.

The two were FW-190s, and as they turned for and whizzed through the formation, in frontal attacks, they nicked two of the low squadron’s B-17s in the wings, then broke away in half rolls. Savage got a good look at one of them, when it flashed past at a six hundred mile-an-hour rate of closure, its yellow nose smoking and small pieces flying off near the wing root.

The gunners of the 918th were in action, and the strong pun- gent smell of burnt cordite filled the cockpit, as the Lily trembled to the recoil of the nose guns, and upper and belly turret guns. Smoke immediately began trailing from the hit B-17s, but they were able to hold their positions.

Here was an early fighter reaction, much earlier than even Savage expected. And there had been something desperate about the way the two FWs had come in, fast, right out of their climb, without any preliminaries.

The innercomm was active for a few seconds with brief ad- monitions: “Lead ’em more”. . . “Use short bursts”. . . “Don’t throw rounds away, we’ve got a long way to go”. . . “Pilot to left waist, don’t yell. Talk slow.” Three minutes later, the gunners were reporting fighters climbing up from all around the clock, singly and in pairs, both FW-190s and Me-109s.

The approaching fighters that Savage could see on his side looked like far too many for sound health, and there were no friendly Thunderbolts visible, anywhere. From now on, Savage knew, the Group was in mortal danger, but he was use to it. His brain, clear as a bell, was able to ignore it.

A co-ordinated attack began, with most of the fighters diving out of the sun, head-on, from TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH. The nine and three o’clock attackers were approaching from about level, and the rear attackers were coming in from slightly below.

The guns from every plane in every Group in the Combat Wing were firing simultaneously.

Lashing the sky with streams of orange tracers, to match the chain-puff bursts coming from the 20 mm cannons, blinking red, from the wings and noses of the German single seaters.

Both sides were getting hurt in this clash, with the entire sec- ond element of three B-17s, from Cobb’s squadron, falling out of formation on fire, and the crews bailing out. One Fortress from Gately’s squadron disappeared in a brilliant, explosive flash, and several fighters headed for the deck in flames, or with their pilots lingering behind under the dirty yellow canopies that distinguish- ed some of their parachutes from those of the Americans.

Savage swallowed hard, against his dry throat. Already, in this first fight, he had lost four aircraft, as against none in twenty- three previous combat missions he had flown. He ordered Gately and Cobb to move their squadrons in closer, for mutual support.

One thought that was uppermost in his mind was, that son-of- a-bitch Galland had finally gotten smart. He’s going to concent- rate on shooting the entire lead Group out of the sky! If he gets me, he told himself, he knows it’s worth two Groups farther back.

Savage glanced over at Rexall. It was freezing in the cockpit, but sweat was running down from the co-pilot’s forehead and over his oxygen mask, even though the aircraft was on automatic pilot and neither man was exerting himself, physically.

The general pulled his mask down, leaned over to the man’s ear and yelled. “I don’t think they like us.”

Rexall returned a halfhearted grin, from under his mask.

Savage then checked with the navigator and found that they were still on course, and on time. He felt a considerable relief, during this brief distraction, from just sitting there and watching the fighters take aim between his eyes.

Every alarm in his brain and heart was ringing a high pitched warning, but his nerves were steady and his brain calm. He knew that the largest, and most ferocious, fighter resistance of the war was rising to stop his formations, at any cost.

A few minutes later, the strike force absorbed the first wave, of a hailstorm, of individual fighter attacks, that were to engulf it all the way to the target, in such a blizzard of bullets and cannon shells, that many a co-pilot closed his eyes. At 1141 hours, over Eupen, Savage looked out the window, after a minute’s lull, and saw that two whole Staffeln, twelve 109s and eleven 190s, were climbing parallel to him, like they were on a steep escalator.

The first group of fighters had soon reached Savage’s altitude and were pulling ahead to turn into him, with the second group not far behind. And several thousand feet below were many more fighters, their noses cocked up in a maximum climb.

Over the innercom came more reports of an equal number of enemy aircraft, deploying on the other side of the formation. Pamela, thought Savage, you were right.

Suddenly he noticed, for the first time, a twin-engine Me-110 long range fighter, painted a crimson red, sitting just out of range and exactly level, out to his right. It would stay with the 918th all the way to the target, apparently radioing its position, and bomb- er stream weak spots, to fresh Staffeln, waiting farther down the line. But, what Savage didn’t know, and Pamela did, by reading intercepts back at Lowestoft, was that Adolph Galland was sitting in that Me-110, biding his time.

Swinging their blue noses around in a wide turn, the twelve plane formation of 109s came in from twelve o’clock, dead ahead, in pairs. The main event was on, and Savage had to fight the impulse to shut his eyes.

He kept his eyes open and then, to his amazement and relief, he saw the fighters going after the high and low Groups of his Combat Wing. Other fighters, he was now seeing, were turning into their attacks before they caught up with the 918th, and were taking their revenge out on Groups farther back.

To Savage, it meant that they were beginning to encounter German pilots with less experience than the earlier yellow nose, Abbeville boys. Far back in the bomber stream, Henderson sat frozen in his seat at the sight of so many enemy fighters.

Struggling against the anxiety that convulsed him, he became convinced that he was going to die. And he watched as a shining silver rectangular piece of metal went sailing past, over his air- craft’s right wing.

He recognized it as a main entrance door and, seconds later, a black lump came hurtling through the formation, barely missing several propellers. It was a man, clasping his knees to his head, revolving like a diver in a triple somersault, shooting by so close that Henderson saw a piece of paper blow out of his leather flight jacket.

A B-17 ahead of him began to gradually turn to the right, out of the formation, but maintaining its altitude. Then, in a split se- cond, it completely vanished in a yellow explosion, from which the only remains were four balls of fire, the fuel tanks, which were quickly consumed as Henderson watched them fall earth- ward.

Up front, Savage made mental notes of the different fighters. Some of them shot at the formation with rockets, and he saw one attempt an air-to-air bombing with little black time-fused sticks, dropped from above, which exploded in small gray puffs, off to one side of the low squadron.

As the minutes passed, the 918th sustained no further losses, although some of the fighters were pressing home their attacks to 250 yards, and less. While others were bolting, flat out, through the formation, firing long twenty second bursts, and often pre- senting themselves as pointblank targets on their breakaway.

Some committed the fatal error of pulling up, instead of going down and out. And upon hearing McIllhenny claim one of these, Savage felt a strange reassurance at the sound of the sergeant’s businesslike voice.

But no enemy tactics could halt the close-knit juggernauts of the Flying Fortress Groups, nor save the single-seat fighters from paying a terrible price. Henderson, watching in horrified fasci- nation, began to perceive that his aircraft, flying in the cluttered wake of a desperate air battle, was endangered by various kinds of debris, as well as by enemy fighters.

Nose hatches, entrance doors, tail gunner’s hatches, premature opening parachutes, bodies, and assorted fragments of B-17s and German fighters breezed past him in the slipstream. He watched as two fighters explode, not far below, and disappear in sheets of orange flame.

B-17s were dropping out of formation in every stage of dis- tress, from engines on fire to controls shot away. Friendly and enemy chutes floated down and, on the green landscape below, funeral pyres of smoke from fallen aircraft marked the route.

Disintegrating aircraft became commonplace, and the white dots of sixty chutes in the air at one time, were hardly worth a second look. The spectacle registering on Henderson’s eyes grew to be so weird, that his brain turned numb to the actuality of the death and destruction that was all around him.

Had it not been for the squeezing of his stomach, which was trying hard to purge itself, he might easily have been watching an animated cartoon in a movie theater. Vaguely, he wondered how Savage, sitting up ahead in the lead aircraft, with nothing in front of him but Germans, had the stomach to keep on going.

The minutes dragged on into an hour, and still the fighters kept coming. Savage’s gunners, coolly and briefly, called out to one another, dividing up their targets, fighting for their lives, and the life of the formation, with every round of ammunition.

McIllhenny called out that he was out of ammo, so the radio operator took another belt back to him. Now, here was a new hazard, and Savage began to worry whether or not they would run out of fifty caliber bullets, even before reaching the target.

Henderson looked out his window and watched, while a Fort- ress turned slowly out to the right, its cockpit a mass of flames. He saw the co-pilot crawl out through the window, hold on with one hand as he reached back for his chute, buckled it on, then let go, and was whisked back into the horizontal stabilizer of the tail. Henderson figured that the impact must have killed him, as his chute never opened.

Henderson then looked straight ahead, and instinctively ducked his head, as he watched the tail gunner of a B-17 in front of him take a bead on his windshield. The gunner then cut loose with a stream of bullets and tracers that passed a few feet over- head, on their way toward an enemy fighter that was attacking from behind.

Still, there was no letup. The Germans queued up like a bread line and let the Fortresses have it, and each second of time had a cannon shell in it.

The strain of being a clay pigeon, at the wrong end of this aerial shooting gallery, became almost intolerable for Savage. And, as on previous missions, he felt an impulse to grab a flare pistol - or anything - and fight back.

The Lily shook steadily with the constant firing of the fifties, and the air inside her was wispy with smoke. Savage checked the engine instruments, for the hundredth time, and every one of them read normal.

None of the crew had been injured yet, which seemed like a miracle. So, maybe, he thought, just maybe, he’d would get to the target, in spite of the 918th’s reduced fire power from the four aircraft that had been lost.

Now, a new problem arose, calling for a decision - one of those decisions that could mean the success or failure of an entire mission. A decision that was easy to make on the ground, but, as bitter experience in the Eighth Air Force had repeatedly proven, was weirdly difficult for a man to make, when thousands of lives were at stake. Where he was alone in the milky never-never world of the frigid sub-stratosphere, while sucking at an oxygen mask. When his eardrums were aching from the maddening splinters of static and enemy radio interference. When he was feeling cramped and acutely uncomfortable, physically, and taut with the stress of the mortal anxiety that subjects a man, under enemy fire, to a sensation akin to having a pair of ice tongs hook- ed into his guts.

The navigator had just informed Savage that the winds aloft, blowing at 120 miles-per-hour, had suddenly shifted and were now blowing in the opposite direction. Should this condition still exist when the target was reached, it would mean that the bomber force would have to approach Hambrucken upwind, from the assigned I.P. (Initial Point), adding minutes of vulnerability to the bomb run and presenting the German flak defenses with a beauti- ful, slow moving target. Thus, Savage began formulating his de- cision with the painful concentration of a patient trying to solve a crossword puzzle, while the dentist is drilling a tooth.

Fifteen minutes from target time, after a breather of several minutes, a new wave of fighters bore in on the 918th. Battle damage soon overtook the Piccadilly Lily with a rush, as several twenty millimeter cannon shells raked her.

The first shell penetrated the right side of the cockpit and ex- ploded below and behind Savage’s armor plate, peppering him slightly about the calves, but damaging the electrical system, and wounding the top-turret gunner in the legs.

A second shell entered the radio compartment and a third shell entered the left side of the nose, tearing out a section about two feet square, damaging the right-hand nose gun installation and injuring the navigator in the head and shoulders. The navigator reported to Savage that he was okay just as another shell pene- trated the right wing root, going into the fuselage and shattering the hydraulic system, releasing the blood-colored fluid all over the cockpit floor and creating a fire hazard.

A fifth shell punctured the cabin roof and severed the rudder cables connecting one side of the rudder. While a sixth shell ex- ploded in the number 3 engine, which then caught fire.

Instantly, as the co-pilot activated the number 3 engine fire extinguishing system, Savage reached over and hit a red knob, marked “3”, and then trimmed the aircraft for three-engine oper- ation. The number 3 propeller slowed down, then stopped, as the blades rotated to a full-feathered position - leading edge to the slipstream.

As the engine fire reduced itself to a thin stream of smoke, the general unfastened his seat belt and shoulder harness, ordered Rexall to take over, then grabbed a small walk-around oxygen bottle and made his way aft, through the bomb bay, to the radio compartment. Feeling his strength starting to ebb, from even this small exertion at the high altitude, he entered the radio room and saw that the radio operator was dead.

He turned his attention to a small fire on the bulkhead, smoth- ering it with a hand held fire extinguisher. Then, after the gun- ners in the waist waved to him that they were okay, he returned to the cockpit and made a check of the rest of the crew over the innercomm.

By advancing the throttles for some additional power, Savage managed to maintain his airspeed and pressed on towards the target. But, because of the fire in the number 3 engine nacelle, a partial loss of the controls, the structural damage and injured personnel, he didn’t know if they could make it, or not.

There was every justification for abandoning the aircraft, a thought which had begun to obsess some of the crew. And with Rexall pleading with him, repeatedly, on the innercomm.

“General Savage! We’ve had it”, he called out, hysterically. “Let’s bail out while we still can!”

The others, listening to the co-pilot’s voice, caught the panic and several began making preparations to leave - order or no order. Savage looked across and saw that Rexall had gone completely to pieces.

He pressed down on his mike button.

“You son-of-a-bitch”, he enunciated, distinctly, “you sit there and take it like the rest of us!”

The psychological effect of those cold-blooded words, com- ing in the nick of time, had an immediate, and magical, effect on the whole crew, and averted a crisis.

The Lily pressed on.

At last, the fighters, their fuel exhausted from the long chase, diminished their attacks on the 918th, to almost nothing. Even the Me-110 executed a 180-degree turn, and disappeared from Savage’s view.

The strike force was approaching the I.P., directly south of the target. Savage called the navigator, who told him that the winds were still blowing hard from the north.

Quickly, Savage discounted the possibility of their bombing upwind, from the designated I.P., and weighed the alternatives. If he selected a new I.P. north of the target, the bombers would benefit by a faster bomb run, with minimum time of exposure to enemy flak. However, the new flight path would take the force over the densest concentrations of the flak positions, which the briefed route had been carefully planned to avoid.

Secondly, the faster bomb run might be too short, with such a tailwind, for accurate bombing. Third, the delay in flying upwind to the new I.P., would upset the timing of the rendezvous of the bombers, with their fighter escorts, on the withdrawal. Hours later, the friendly fighters, at the limit of their fuel range, would be waiting to meet the bombers, but they wouldn’t be able to wait very long: minutes, even seconds, could be decisive.

Savage elected to discard the alternative in favor of bombing cross wind, from an I.P. about ten miles west of Hambrucken, since an I.P. east of the target would take them farther into enemy territory, and prolong the mission.

“Pilot to navigator”, he called. “How’s the visibility west of the target area?”

To the navigator, the general’s calm voice gave the casual im- pression of a man asking what was playing at the movies.

“Navigator to pilot”, he called back. “Hazy west of target. No undercast.” “Roger”, replied Savage.

The general consulted his map.

“Pilot to tail gunner. How close is the next Combat Wing?”

“Tail gunner to pilot. They’re right behind us, sir.”

Savage breathed a little easier. He wouldn’t have to break radio silence to divulge the change of plans to the commanders following him.

“Ah, pilot to navigator. Set course for Halstuben. That is the new I.P.”

Firing an orange flare to alert the bomber stream in his wake, to a change of plan, Savage swung his aircraft around to its new heading. He then fired another flare over Halstuben, as the Lily turned again, into its bombing run.

“Okay, Roby”, he called to the bombardier. “You take it on in from the I.P. Is everything okay?” “Bombardier to pilot. There’s a hell of a crosswind, General. But I think I can hold the target.” To himself, Savage hoped, almost tearfully, that his decision had been the right one. That, as he phrased it in his mind, “So some poor bastards wouldn’t have to go back another day and do this all over, again.”

The 918th proceeded on its bomb run, and as the bomb bay doors opened, a red light lit up on the instrument panel. Savage looked up ahead, and watched as ugly, black puffs of smoke began appearing level with the aircraft’s nose. Flak, and plenty of it. Enough to get out and walk on. But a lot less, he knew, than there would have been north of Hambrucken.

A black burst mushroomed so close in front of the Lily, that Savage could see the red flame in the heart of the smoke. Simul- taneously, there was a metallic crunch and a jerk, as a heavy fragment of steel punctured the nose compartment up front.

Over the innercomm, he heard the single word from Roby - “Bombs . . .” But the word “away” did not come. The red light blinked out, and the B-17, relieved of its bomb load, surged upward.

The navigator called out, frantically . . .

“Roby’s hit bad! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Savage gripped the control wheel and turned it to the left, away from the target, while looking down to see that Cobb, on the inside of the turn, didn’t overrun the formation. In the next instant, Savage was appalled to see a burst of flak catch Cobb’s B-17 directly in the tail, severing it.

The aircraft started straight down, but almost immediately, it exploded into a thousand fragments, no bigger that a man’s fist. And there was no sign of any chutes.

Cobb’s instant death registered on Savage’s eyes, but not in his brain. He pressed his mike button. “Able leader to Charlie two and Charlie three, tack on behind Able Squadron”, he called, sharply! The two surviving Fortresses of Cobb’s six-ship, low squad- ron, dropped back behind Savage.

Calling on the bottom most depths of his self control, Savage set course for home. He sent Rexall below to check up on Roby, then he looked back towards the target.

Pillars of smoke rose from the vicinity of the Aiming Point, at the ball bearing plant, and above it, boring in through dense barr- ages of smoky flak, the other Groups were raining down their bombs.

The mission had succeeded.

Breaking radio silence, Savage called to Gately on the V.H.F. radio. “Able leader to Baker leader, over.”

“Baker leader to Abler leader, go ahead.”

“My radio operator is dead, Baker. Can you send the strike report to headquarters for me?” “Roger that. Baker leader out.”

Hundreds of miles to the west, at Lowestoft, this conversation was being monitored by a W.A.A.F., who immediately carried it to Flight Leftenant Mallory. Pamela’s brain reeled with relief, as she said to herself; “Frank is still alive”.

The sending of the commander’s strike report indicated that, yes, Savage was still alive. And it was the first RT-intercept from the Americans, as all the rest had been German. And all of them portents of disaster, spearheaded by an intercept from Adolph Galland, indicating that he had landed to refuel, before resuming the chase.

Pamela hid her face in her hands.

When Rexall returned from the nose compartment, he gave Savage an incredible report. An instant before bombs away, Roby, crouching over his bombsight, had been hit in the chest by a piece of flak, which hurled him back six feet, to the rear of the compartment. He had force himself forward, released the bombs and dropped dead over the bombsight, in the middle of saying,

“Bombs away”.

Savage gradually hypnotized himself into sort of a coma, in which his mind, grasping like a drowning man at a straw, clung to just one thought - stay on course and get home. The death of Cobb, of Roby, of the radio operator, and even the overwhelm- ing fact that they had successfully bombed Hambrucken, receded into his subconscious. There was still the eternity of the long journey back to Archbury, but thankfully the engine fire had finally gone out.

Occasionally the sky would, again, become mottled with en- emy fighters. But their attacks were sporadic, because the Ger- mans, too, had fought themselves out.

Suddenly, Savage glanced down at his map, then called the navigator.

“Pass Control Point eight, at twelve miles north of course”, he said. “Got it?” “Twelve miles north of course at Control Point eight. Roger.”

There was a pause, then the navigator called back. “That’ll take us right over Luftstalag Nine, sir”, he said. “That’s a Roger”, answered Savage.

Half an hour later, Jesse Bishop, sitting on the steps of a bar- racks at Luftstalag Nine, heard a deep, low rumbling in the sky. Slanting his eyes upward, he made out a long column of black specks - fifteen miles long.

His eyes opened wide and his lips parted.

“Hundreds of ‘em! There must be hundreds of ‘em!”

He turned to a pilot standing next to him, who was also staring skyward. “It’s Savage”, Bishop cried out! “I know it’s Savage, and the 918th.”

Twenty thousand feet above Luftstalag Nine, Savage, having delivered on his promise, hoped that Bishop, and the others, had seen the B-17s.

One hour later, and feeling like a man recovering from an anesthetic, Savage heard the navigator call out, happily.

“I can see the coast. sir.”

It was true. Savage caught a glimpse of sunlight flashing off the expanse of water in the distance.

The gunners, surrendering to the reaction from the long hours under the tense strain, began to chatter excitedly. Savage calmed them down, cautioning them to stay on their toes, because the friendly fighters, fogged bound at their bases in England, had not been able to keep their rendezvous.

At last, the English Channel appeared, and they were leaving the enemy coast. Savage nosed the Piccadilly Lily down, into a gradual decent, toward England.

And then, McIllhenny shot a final squirt of adrenaline into everybody’s weary bloodstream, with the warning . . .

“Four fighters at five o’clock low!”

Savage immediately called the other Group Commanders and alerted them. This was just the kind of situation that could be fatal, as more than once, enemy fighters had shot down B-17s, whose gunners had already removed the barrels from their mach- ine guns, when they were almost home.

The unidentified fighters finally came into Savage’s field of vision - three FW-190s and the same red Me-110. They were climbing fast, above the horizon, and far ahead.

Suddenly they turned, and dived directly for the 918th. With her nose guns shot out, the Lily had only its two top turret guns to defend itself with, as the fighters swelled into close range and were apparently aiming right at Savage’s cockpit.

In another second, with the leading edges of their wings blink- ing tiny flashes of light, they shot, head-on, through the 918th’s formation. The number 1 and number 4 engines were hit and quit, almost immediately, leaving the Lily with only one oper- ating engine.

Savage shoved the control column forward and dove straight for the water. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that somebody, probably Adolph Galland, was out to get him, person- ally.

The tail gunner called.

“Keep agoin’, General. Them bastards are tailing us!”

Savage gradually pulled out of the dive, as close as he dared get to the water, hoping that the B-17, relieved of the weight of nearly all of its fuel and ammunition, might reach the English coast on one engine. It had been done before.

He order the ball turret to be dropped and all equipment on board jettisoned, except guns, ammunition and ditching gear. The aircraft began slowing down, from 250 K.I.A. (Knots Indi-

cated Airspeed) to 150 knots, then to 100 knots, and finally to 90 knots.

Pulling maximum manifold pressure, the number 2 engine rapidly overheated, and began losing power. Savage looked out and saw that the fighters were circling, unable to attack from be- low, and apparently reluctant to take a chance of diving and pull- ing up too late, to avoid hitting the water.

“Stand by for ditching”, ordered Savage! “Acknowledge.”

The men called back from their stations, one by one. Just above wave-crest level, Savage cut off the last engine.

“Here we go”, he called. “Get set!”

The B-17 settled into the water with a huge cloud of spray and decelerated violently to a standstill, its tail high and the cock- pit partly submerged. The eight survivors, acting automatically from the habits instilled in them from their ditching practice drills, scrambled through the escape hatches, then released the two dinghies from on top of the fuselage, clambered aboard and shoved off from the slowly sinking Flying Fortress.

“Look out”, screamed a voice!

A second later, a stream of bullets stitched a series of foaming puddles across the water, a few feet from Savage’s dinghy. And they were followed by the roar of the red Me-110, as it pulled out of a shallow dive. The three 190s had disappeared and only the 110 had lingered around for the kill.

Without hesitation, Sergeant McIllhenny dove from Savage’s dinghy and swam, with powerful strokes, back to the B-17. He climbed up on the wing, before Savage, who was watching the German fighter, knew what was happening.

“Hey! McIllhenny”, yelled Savage! “Come back! Do you hear me? Get the hell back in this dinghy . . . quick. That’s an order!”

But McIllhenny paid no heed. And he began lowering him- self through a cockpit window, pausing only to glance up at the German fighter, which was maneuvering into position for yet another pass at the stranded men.

McIllhenny disappeared for a moment, then Savage saw his head emerge in the blister of the top turret, which, except for the aircraft’s tail, was the only part of the Lily above water. Over his shoulder, Savage saw the fighter begin its approach, but his atten- tion was still focused on McIllhenny, at whom he and the other crew members were frantically calling.

McIllhenny held his fire until the German was within range. Then he let loose his twin fifty calibers, spouting streams of lead.

As the Piccadilly Lily began settling towards her final plunge, the water rose over the top of the turret, until only the muzzles of the guns, still smoking, showed above the surface. But, they too soon disappeared beneath the waves.

The Me-110 roared past and this time it was trailing smoke, because, before he died, McIllhenny had gotten a piece of it. And, apparently, Galland had had enough, as he turned and soon faded south toward the French coast.

Twenty minutes later, an Air Sea Rescue launch of the R.A.F. arrived, along side of the two dinghies. In them, they found six men, who greeted them with cheers, and a weary general who looked up at them with eyes like those of a dead man.