Free The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

spectacle. The planes lined up nose to tail on the taxiway and headed for the turn onto the runway. The flashing reflections off the planes taxiing ahead sometimes blazed like machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines was lyrical, like the thunder of a herd of young horses, spirited and healthy. Engines revving, the planes sashayed out in a long, slow file, waddling side to side. B-17s were tail draggers. For a better view over the noses, the pilots wriggled the planes sideways—left, then right, left, then right. Under other circumstances, it might have seemed comical.
    As each plane reached the top of the runway, it turned, still rolling. Throttles went forward, the engines bellowed, and the ship raced into the air, following those ahead, with more coming just behind. Liftoff after liftoff, one every thirty seconds. They climbed out of the ground gloom into brilliant sunlight and began circling the field, maneuvering to establish their formation, each bomber slipping into its assigned slot.
    Marshall believed the B-17 was an elegant aircraft. He had been so young, so cocksure, he took it for granted that hundreds of heavy bombers could squeeze together in tight aerial patterns and fly long distances with no collisions, no peppering one another with all their bristling machine guns, no smashing one another with their long streams of deadly bombs. In training, he hadn’t yet grasped how stupefyingly harmonious a full operational mission would be—a thousand bombers hurtling through the sky as a single, immense, layered entity, a unified airborne fleet.
    The flight to Frankfurt was steady and routine—that is, nerve-wracking and physically exhausting. Marshall loved it. He loved that exuberance that came from the closeness of other Forts. Riding in the turbulence from the planes around them was exhilarating. He and Webb took turns holding position on the west ship’s wing tip. The physical effort to hold their plane in formation was like roping a steer and pressing it down for hour after hour. Working the throttles, constantly adjusting and readjusting speed, flicking their eyes from the instruments to the sky and back, kept them from thinking about the cold. The contrails from the planes ahead and above blew past in steady streams, chalk marks etching the sky. They were in the dazzling midst of a beautiful deadly force. Marshall was on the alert for unusual moves by the fighter escorts, the “little friends,” or some looming Nazi bastard. He needed the eyes of a fly, omnidirectional.
    The roar of many thousands of engines was a thunderous symphony. The air was North Pole cold, but the sheepskin-lined helmet and his leather jacket were cozy, and the cockpit had some heat. Farther back, the waist gunners shivered in the open windows, but they wore electric flight suits. In battle they could warm themselves with the heat of their busy guns. Hootie claimed he never noticed the cold.
    At ten thousand feet, they donned their “Halloween masks” for oxygen. They were up too high to smoke, too high to breathe—just when Marshall could have used a cigarette. At twenty thousand feet, he saw the ground as an abstraction, a schematic of peaceful farmland, brown like faded, worn-out rugs. As they flew farther north, snow cover started to appear, until the ground was a patchwork of whites, like overlapping tablecloths of varying pale shades.
    Time passed, the timelessness that takes over when every split second is eternal. It was peaceful—until they met some Messerschmitts he did not care to remember.
    Near target, Al Grainger crawled past the cockpit on his way to the bomb bay to pull the pins.
    “Al’s dressing his eggs!” Hootie yelled through the inter-phone as he always did.
    Webb, the pilot, issued his routine reprimand. “Cut the blab, boys.”
    He transferred control to the bombardier at the IP, the initial point on the approach. As always, Webb said, “O.K., bombardier, you got it.” Easing back from the