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their time in training began to drag. There was a seemingly endless succession of lectures on aircraft identification, gunnery tactics, formation flying and the intricacies of the B-17’s hydraulic and electrical systems. Harry could see how it was all supposed to be useful, but he was beginning to think his brain couldn’t take any more.
    Harry also began to realise that there were certain men it was best to avoid. They were easy enough to spot – the shaky ones with frightened eyes; and the ones who seemed to delight in putting the wind up the new boys – like the two older guys, Gus and Lenny, who sat with Harry and John one time in the mess.
    They were in their mid-twenties maybe, both gunners, recently transferred from Rattlesden. They spent the whole meal swapping gory stories about crews who had been killed on missions.
    ‘That Fort that crashed here back from Schweinfurt, the one that landed with its wheels up,’ Lenny said. ‘Heard the belly turret gunner got trapped in that little ball …’
    John interrupted. ‘Hey, fellas, leave it, will you? We saw that plane crash as soon as we got here.’
    ‘You a ball turret gunner?’ Gus asked Harry with a smirk.
    He guessed they probably knew his position on the Macey May and were just trying to make him crack. He tried not to let them bother him, but what he’d heard put him off his food.
    ‘Strawberry jelly,’ Lenny said, with added sound effects to drive the point home. ‘Ya wouldn’t get me in one of them ball turrets.’
    Harry and John got up to leave soon afterwards. As they walked back to their hut, Harry felt a wave of despair as he thought about how small his chances of survival actually were. ‘Do you think anyone does their twenty-five missions?’
    ‘Those creeps in the mess got to you, didn’t they?’ John said, and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. ‘Not everybody dies in a bomber that goes down – don’t ever forget that, Harry. They parachute out. Why d’you think they give us those talks about escaping? It happens all the time.’
    Their Nissen hut was still half empty, which suited them. It would not be filling up until more new crews arrived. For the moment, they had nearly as much space as the officers. But Harry was spooked by the empty beds on the other side of the aisle. He realised the bunk he now lay in had been previously been occupied by a man who was now most likely dead.
    He could imagine his predecessor, a young man from Idaho, or San Francisco, or Maine, staring at the undersideof the bunk above, a stranger in a strange land, having the same anxious nights as him. Had that guy wondered what fate awaited him? You’d have to be made of stone not to. He wondered whether he’d been killed by flak or cannon fire from a Nazi Messerschmitt, or that newer one, the Focke-Wulf … or maybe he’d been trapped in a burning Fortress as it plunged to the ground. You only died once, but as an aviator there were a thousand ways to die.
    As they got ready for bed, John tried to lighten the mood. ‘Tell you what, boys, when all this is over, I’ll cook you all a coq au vin at the fancy restaurant I’m gonna be workin’ in.’
    ‘After the garbage they give us in the chow hall, we’re gonna be ready for it,’ said Dalinsky.
    Corrales had come in from the washroom, carrying a towel under his arm. ‘Hey, Hill – don’t talk crap. You’re Irish, ain’tcha? They have the worst food in the world, apart from the Limeys!’
    John smiled. ‘Bet you I cook a better chilli than your mama!’
    ‘Hill, everyone cooks a better chilli than my mama.’
    But Harry was not in the mood to join in the joshing with his buddies. As he tried to fall asleep he kept thinking about what John had said about parachuting down. You’d have an uncertain future in the hands of the Krauts. But ‘uncertain’ was better than dead. Dead was never having another conversation with your loved ones and friends, never seeing another sunset … He’d