22,000 feet over Vienna, Austria September 26, 1944
Somewhere in the distance, a life ended. The Liberator pilot could not care if it was an American who flew from a base just north of Venice, or a German defending a critical supply node. His attention was focused the gauges and dials and levers in front of him. All four engines were running at their full regular power to let him get his heavily laden bomber through the flak alley as quickly as possible before the thousands of pounds of steel and explosives left the bomber's belly and fell towards, hopefully, the rail marshalling and repair yards just outside the city. Vienna was a critical node for the German armies that were in Hungary and western Romania as well as the few battered corps that had hung on in northern Yugoslavia. Trains carried ammunition and replacements forward to units that had retreated several hundred miles since July. The same trains carried back critical industrial tools and German bureaucrats. Other trains would come through Vienna before heading north to the camps in Poland and Bavaria with their human cargo stuffed so tight that many died before they could walk again.
The pilot held the controls steady. He took a deep breath and began to count down the seconds until the bombardier would allow him to make the aircraft slightly less predictable in time and space. But until then, he ran the aircraft as straight and as true as possible. The bomber jumped skyward as the bombs emptied. The engines sounded slightly different as they struggled less to move the much lighter aircraft forward through the ugly black scars of flak puncturing the partial cloud layer. The pilot could look again briefly. Off to the east, a bomber exploded as a shell ripped open an almost empty fuel tank and the vapors ignited in a high pressure fire ball. He looked back a few seconds later and saw a single chute pop open.
22,000 feet beneath him, the ground did not stop shaking for another forty five minutes.
