american-2

"The brass know about your feeling's, Tom, and there's supposed to be word on a fighter which has legs, but it ain't around just yet. Let's all keep our eyes peeled, and make sure that your captain can return to see his new girl."

With the admission that he had made progress with his Nancy, the mood in the big bomber lightened considerably. The next word was, inevitably, from Shorty, "Say, Cap', we'd all like to kinda' say we were wrong, and we hope your little gal ain't put out too much? She looked kinda' sweet sitting in the jeep, and I hope it all goes well, Sir."

Grinning beneath his mask, Johnny Lorenz shook his head, knowing that his private life would now be up on the big board, with headlines every week as far as this bunch was concerned. "Okay," he replied, "on behalf of Miss Carter and myself, I thank you for the kind words, now please can we get back to the war?"

He called up the radio man, and when Marius replied, simply asked, "Any fighter chatter?"

"Nothing so far, sir. Do you think they are gonna sic' em on us early?"

"Difficult to say, they might not have figured where we are headed, so we might be lucky!"

The formation droned on, with one hundred-eighty craft each loaded with over four tons of bombs, and as they passed over the French town of Nancy, the fighter formations fell away for their return trip to their British bases. Feeling real lonely, all the bomber pilots instinctively ordered a sharper look-out, and Johnny was no exception. They had seen some flak come up at their group, but it seemed as if they had not been noticed. However, as the huge formation droned over Strasbourg, which was just on the France-Germany border, the whole sky commenced erupting with flak bursts, and the aircraft literally bounced with the force of the blasts. The crews knew that there was nothing that could be done, apart from choosing odd altitudes to fly at, which made the gunnery crews' jobs down on the ground just that little bit trickier. The ferocity of the attacks, and the undeviating tracks of the attacking force meant that sooner or later, the anti-aircraft fire would get lucky, and in the next section to Johnny's flight, one shell struck home. The shell seemed to explode underneath the starboard wing of the bomber named ‘Lazy Daze'. The explosion hit hard, and the big aircraft slowed and fell out of the tight formation, smoke streaming aft from the wing root and wing. Suddenly there was a blast, as the fuel tanks caught all at once, and the stricken craft heeled majestically over, and commenced to plummet from