And then, as quickly as it had begun, the skirmish was over.
“Danny’s Darling” droned on and on in straight and level flight, waiting for something else–antiaircraft or fighter–to try to knock it from the sky. The feeling of helpless terror returned. And despite the cold of their altitude, he was sweating.
As they approached the outskirts of Dortmund, where their target was the Krupp steel mills, the antiaircraft fire resumed. It seemed to be much heavier than it had been the first time. There were far too many black bursts to count.
The three-minute bombing run was the longest period in Ed Biter’s life.
He was desperately afraid that he was going to lose control of his stomach, if not his bowels. He had been afraid, and often, flying against the Japanese, but nothing like this. Here, it was like being tied to a stake before a bull’seye target on a rifle range. You could neither dodge nor fight back.
His sense of relief was enormous when he felt the B-17 shudder as it was freed of the weight of the bomb load, a moment before the bombardier’s voice came over the earphones, “Bombs away!”
“Close bomb-bay doors,” Ester ordered as he moved the B-17 into a climbing turn to the right.
In the middle of the turn, Biter looked back at the still-oncoming bomber stream. They seemed to be suspended on the black puffs of smoke the exploding antiaircraft shells made. As he watched, two planes fell out of formation, One exploded violently a second after he noticed it.
The second fell into a shallow spin.
Five minutes later, Ester’s composure left him. There was not just excitement but unmistakable fear in his voice as he cried on the intercom, “Bandits, dead ahead. Christ, there’s four of them.” Biter watched in terror as one after another, four Messerschmidt fighters flashed past the B-17, their unbelievable closing speed moving them much too fast for him to get a shot at them.
He could hear the belly gunner’s and the tail gunner’s twin fifties firing as they went away, but somehow he knew that was futile.
Then there was a strange whistling noise, a wave of icy air, and the B-17 made a steep diving turn to the right. Bitter thought it was high time Ester made an evasive maneuver, then he remembered that bombers were trained not to make evasive maneuvers but to hold their formation, to preserve their’ box of fire” at whatever cost.
And then the flight engineer, his voice hollow with horror, came on the intercom, “Navy guy,” he said, “can you come to the cockpit?” Supporting himself against the centrifugal force of the steep turn, Biter made his way forward.
Ester was leaning forward, against the wheel. The top of his head was gone, but his earphones, incredibly, remained pinned to what was left of his head. Bitter could see the gray soupy mash of his brain.
The copilot, blood streaming down his face, was taut against his shoulder harness as he tried to pull the wheel back against the weight of Ester’s body and the aerodynamic forces of the dive itself.
Bitter pulled Ester’s body back in the seat and started to unfasten the blood-slippery harness latches. When he turned to the flight engineer to get him to help move Ester’s body out of the seat, he saw that the copilot, who had just barely managed to force the airplane into a nearly level attitude, was looking at him with glazed, terrified eyes.
His yellow rubber’ Mae West” inflatable life jacket was streaming blood.
The flight engineer was looking at Ester’s open skull, then he threw up.
“Help me get him out of there!” Biter ordered.
When there was no response, Biter decided to move the body himself.
Ester was a lot heavier than he looked. And once his head tilted backward, a thick, glutinous mess spilled out of it onto Biter.
But he dragged him into the aisle between the seats and slipped into the pilot’s seat. The copilot was now slumped unconscious.
And the B-17 was entering a spin.
If he couldn’t bring it out of that, they would all die.
Centrifugal force would pin them where they were, they couldn’t even bail out.