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For defensive purposes, it was critical to stay in formation. The fighter escorts did not have the range of the bombers, and so had to turn back as the bombers pressed deeper and deeper into German territory as the weeks progressed. That left the B-17s unprotected from the Messerschmitt fighters. However, it wasn’t for nothing that the American bombers were called Flying Fortresses. With an array of heavy machine guns, a B-17 created a defensive perimeter around itself. The Germans nicknamed the B-17s “Flying Porcupines” for good reason. There were weak points and blind spots, however, which was why it was critical to stay in position. The squadron’s formation enabled the planes to cover one another, thus creating a zone of defense around their bombers.

That was the theory, anyhow, and it all sounded good in flight school. Reality was a bit different. A German Me109 moved at more than four hundred miles per hour, fired 20 mm cannon rounds that left holes the size of a softball in a bomber’s thin skin, and flew circles around the lumbering B-17. In close air combat, it tested the limits of human reflexes to be able to swivel and fire at a target moving at that speed. To be sure, it took a young man’s reflexes. Whitlock used to do some trapshooting with his grandfather, Senator Harrison Whitlock II, and it had been hard enough to hit a clay pigeon with a 12-gauge shotgun. Compared to a German fighter, a clay pigeon now seemed like a slow, lumbering target. And the clay pigeon wasn’t shooting back.

It took a lot of firing, and a lot of luck, to knock a German fighter out of the sky. Fortunately, the B-17 made up for being slow by being tough. Lucky Girl could take an awful lot of abuse of the flying lead variety.

As they neared the target, bursts of flak began to claw the sky. Lucky Girl danced in the turbulence from the explosions. Whitlock tried not to think too much about what it would mean to take a direct hit. Until a few months ago, he had never heard of the word “flak,” which was a British interpretation of what the Germans called Flug Abarhr Kanone—anti-aircraft ordnance. Now he was all too aware of the word. Call it whatever you wanted—by any name it was nerve-wracking as hell.

The intercom crackled, and the navigator came on to give him an update.

“Hey Cap, we’re getting close.”

Whitlock glanced at his own map, which was more rudimentary than the navigator’s. He could see they were near the drop zone. He got the bombardier on the intercom.

“I’ll hold her steady,” Whitlock said. “You send the presents down the chimney.”

On this plane, there were several jobs going on at once. The navigator. The bombardier. The flight engineer. The radio operator. Four separate gunners, including the Sperry ball turret gunner, provided defense. And there was a co-pilot, in case Whitlock caught a piece of that flak, or became otherwise incapacitated. His own job was to get them to the target and back in one piece.

Every crew member could hear the mechanical whirring as the bomb bay doors opened. Lucky Girl shuddered and a different pitch or sound filled the plane, which was now exposed to the terrible cold of high altitude Germany.

“We are on target,” announced the bombardier, his voice made crackly by the intercom. Whitlock could imagine him hunched over the Norden bombsight in the nose of the aircraft. “Bombs away!”

The bomber’s payload dropped, whistling toward the earth far below. A single pound of high explosive contained enough energy to turn an object the size of a pickup truck into scrap metal. By comparison, each bomb carried by Lucky Girl contained up to 500 pounds of high explosive, enough to level a factory—and then some. The squadron had just dropped several dozen such bombs.

Whitlock tried not to think too much about the people far below. They were only bombing military targets, but that definition had become broader with each passing month. These were not the front lines. There were schools, churches, and homes down there. Death from above did not always discriminate. And Whitlock was the courier.

Far below, they watched the impact of the bombs pucker the German landscape.

With the bombs dropped, it was now Whitlock’s job as pilot to get them home. In a long, graceful maneuver in the thin air, the squadron turned together, and started back.

They flew through another curtain of flak. Hot metal splinters raked the air.

The co-pilot leaned forward, peering into the sky ahead. The lumpy patches of cloud provided good cover for enemy fighters waiting to pounce.

Whitlock gave his co-pilot a nervous sideways look. They all knew that the Luftwaffe was down, but not out. Even at this late stage of the war, the enemy managed to scramble a few fighters.

“You see something?” Whitlock asked.

“Nah, there’s nothing.” Then Bronson bolted in his chair. “Wait! We’ve got a bandit at three o’clock!”

“I see him!”

“What the hell?” Bronson’s voice was shrill. “That guy came out of nowhere!”