Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth Wein

Genres: YA Action & Adventure; YA Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Rose Justice is a young pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War. On her way back from a semi-secret flight in the waning days of the war, Rose is captured by the Germans and ends up in Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi women's concentration camp. There, she meets an unforgettable group of women, including a once glamorous and celebrated French detective novelist whose Jewish husband and three young sons have been killed; a resilient young girl who was a human guinea pig for Nazi doctors trying to learn how to treat German war wounds; and a Nachthexen, or Night Witch, a female fighter pilot and military ace for the Soviet air force. These damaged women must bond together to help each other survive. In this companion volume to the critically acclaimed novel Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein continues to explore themes of friendship and loyalty, right and wrong, and unwavering bravery in the face of indescribable evil.

Release date: September 10, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 369

Sample

Rose Moyer Justice

August 2, 1944

Hamble, Hampshire

NOTES FOR AN ACCIDENT REPORT

I just got back from Celia Forester’s funeral. I’m supposed to be writing up an official report for the Tempest she flew into the ground, since she’s obviously not going to write it herself, and I saw it happen. And also because I feel responsible. I know it wasn’t my fault—I really do know that now. But I briefed her. We both had Tempests to deliver, and I’d flown one a couple of times before. Celia hadn’t. She took off ten minutes after me. If she’d taken off first, we might both still be alive.

I’ve never had to do a report like this, and I don’t really know where to begin. Maddie gave me this beautiful leather-bound notebook to draft it in; she thinks it helps to have nice paper, and knew I wouldn’t buy any for myself, since, like everything else, it’s so scarce. She says you need to bribe yourself because it’s always blah writing up accident reports. She had to write a big report herself last January and also be grilled in person by the Accident Committee. She’s right about nice paper, of course, and I have filled up a couple of those pretty cloth-bound diaries that lock; but all I ever put in them are attempts at poetry. Too bad I can’t put the accident report into verse.

There were a few other Air Transport Auxiliary pilots at Celia’s funeral, but Maddie was the only ATA girl besides me. Felicyta couldn’t come; she had a delivery chit this morning. Along with Celia and Felicyta, Maddie and I were the ones who gave out Mrs. Hatch’s strawberries to the soldiers lining up to board the landing craft for the D-Day invasion. It made us into friends. Felicyta was very tearful this morning, banging things around angrily. Probably she shouldn’t be flying. I know exactly what Daddy would say—three thousand miles away on Justice Field in Pennsylvania—if it was me: “Rosie, go home. You shouldn’t fly while your friends are being buried.” But the planes have got to be delivered. There’s a war on.

Boy, am I sick of hearing that.

It never stops. There are planes to deliver every day straight from the factory or just overhauled, painted in fresh camouflage or invasion stripes, ready to go to France. I got thrown in at the deep end when I stepped off the ship from New York three months ago, and before the end of May I was delivering Spitfires, real fighter planes, from Southampton’s factories near the Hamble Aerodrome to just about every airbase in southern England. I was supposed to get some training, but they just put me through a few flight tests instead. Being the daughter of someone who runs a flight school has paid off in spades—I’ve been flying since I was twelve, which means I’ve been flying longer than some of the older pilots, even though I’m only eighteen. The baby on the team.

There was a lull for a week after D-Day, when the invasion started. Actually, I don’t think it should be called an “invasion” when really we are trying to get most of Europe back from the Germans, who invaded it in the first place. Our Allied soldiers left for France in the beginning of June, and for one week only military flights got authorized, so there was no flying for us—the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain are civilian pilots, like the WASPs at home. That was a quiet week, the second week of June. Then the flying bombs started coming in.

Holy smoke, I can’t say how much I hate the flying bombs.

V-1 is what the Germans call them. V stands for “Vergeltungswaffe”, retaliation weapon. I worked hard at memorizing the real word for it, because I always think it means vengeance: Vengeance Weapon No. 1. The only thing these bombs are meant to do is terrify people. Everyone puts on a brave face, though—the English are very good at putting on a brave face, I’ll give them that! People try to make the bombs less scary by giving them stupid names: doodlebugs—sounds like baby talk. Buzz bombs—a phrase for older kids to use. The other ferry pilots call them pilotless planes, which should seem simple and technical, but it gives me the creeps. An aircraft flying blind, no cockpit, no windows, no way of landing except to self-destruct? How can you win an air war against a plane that doesn’t need a pilot? A plane that turns into a bomb? Our planes, the British and American aircraft I fly every day in the ATA, don’t even have radios, much less guns. We don’t stand a chance. Celia Forester didn’t stand a chance.

At the funeral, the local minister—vicar, they say here—had never even met Celia. He called her “a dedicated pilot.”

It doesn’t mean anything. We’re all dedicated. But to tell the truth, I don’t think any of us would have had anything better to say. Celia was so quiet. She was only just posted to Hamble in May, about the same time I was, and for the same reason—to ferry planes for the invasion. She hardly ever talked to anybody. I can’t blame her—she had a fiancé who was in Bomb Disposal and was killed at Christmas. It’s bad enough being a newcomer without being stuck grieving for your boyfriend. Celia wasn’t very happy here.

Am I happy here?

I guess I am. I like what I’m doing. I wanted to come so badly—I can’t believe they gave me that diploma in December, like Laura Ingalls Wilder leaving school at fifteen so she could be a teacher! And now here I am, in England for the first time, not far from where Daddy was born, and I’m actually helping. I’m useful. Even without Uncle Roger being so high up in the Royal Engineers, cutting through the red tape for me, I’d have found a way to get here. And I’m a lot luckier than Celia in other ways, not just because I’m still alive—I’m lucky to have met Nick almost as soon as I got here, and lucky to have had so much flying experience before I started.

I’ve read over that last paragraph and it sounds so chirpy and stuck-up and—just so dumb. But the truth is I have to keep reminding myself again and again that I want to do this, because I’m so tired now. None of us ever get enough sleep. Not just because we’re working so hard; it’s those horrible flying bombs, too.

The tiredness is beginning to show. We’re all cracking at the seams, I think. Maddie and I ended up being taken out to lunch by Celia’s parents after the funeral, because Maddie had still been sitting in our pew sobbing quietly into her handkerchief after everyone else had left, and I was sitting with her and sniffling a bit, too. I am sure the Foresters were touched to find anyone showing so much raw emotion at their daughter’s short, bleak funeral, when everyone else there hardly knew her.

But neither one of us had actually been crying for Celia. On the train back to Southampton, Maddie confessed to me, “My best friend was killed in action, in ‘enemy action,’ like it always says in the obituaries, exactly eight months ago. She didn’t get a funeral.”

“My gosh,” I said. I can’t really imagine what it must feel like to have your best friend killed by a bomb or gunfire. So I added, “Well, it was brave of you to come along today!”

Maddie said, “I felt like a rat eating lunch with the Foresters. So cheap and ugly. Them paying for the meal and me trying to think of anything to say about Celia apart from ‘She was a nice girl but she never talked to anybody.’”

“I know. I felt that way too. Look, we’re both rats, Maddie—I was being more selfish than you. I couldn’t think about anything all day except having to write the darned accident report. Celia had never been up in a Tempest before, and we only had one set of pilot’s notes between us, and she refused to take them with her. I should have forced her to take them. And I bet now they won’t let any other girls near a Tempest till the accident’s been investigated, and if we don’t get to fly ’em again it’ll be MY FAULT as much as Celia’s.”

“They’ll let us fly ’em,” Maddie said mournfully. “Desperate times, and all that.”

She’s probably right. The fighter pilots need all the Tempests they can get. They’re the best planes we’ve got for shooting down flying bombs.

When Maddie and I got back to the aerodrome at Hamble, Felicyta was waiting for us. She was sitting in a corner of the Operations Room and had made a little funeral feast. She had a plate of toast cut up into one-inch squares with a bit of margarine and the tiniest blob of strawberry jam on each square—simple but pretty.

“We make do with not much, as usual,” Felicyta said, and tried to smile. “Here are teacups. Was it terrible?”

I nodded. Maddie grimaced.

“Celia’s mother says we should share the things from her locker,” I said. “Mrs. Forester doesn’t want any of it back.”

Now we all grimaced.

“Someone’s got to do it,” I said. Maddie began pouring tea, and Felicyta touched me lightly on the shoulder, like she wanted to support me but was a little embarrassed to show it. She gave an odd, tight smile and said, “I will take care of Celia’s locker. You must report this accident, Rosie?”

“Yes, I’m writing the accident report. Lucky me.”

“These papers are for you.” Felicyta patted a cardboard file folder on the table’s worn oilcloth. “It is a letter from the mechanic who examined Celia’s plane after her crash. He gave it to me when I flew there this morning. You need to read this before you write the report.”

“Is it secret?”

I had to ask because so many things are confidential.

“No, it is not secret, but—” Felicyta took a deep breath—“you saw Celia crash. You said you thought the ailerons on her wings did not work. This letter tells why. Celia hit a flying bomb.”

Now that I’m sitting here with this notebook, I don’t know if I should tell the Accident Committee what the mechanic said, because it is exactly the kind of thing they’ll use as an excuse to stop girls from flying Tempests—though I bet any guy would do the same thing, given the chance.

Felicyta wasn’t kidding. The mechanic thinks Celia ran into a V-1 flying bomb. No, not “ran into” it—not accidentally. He thinks she did it on purpose. He thinks she tried to tip a flying bomb out of the sky.

Oh—it is crazy.

When Felicyta told me, over the sad little squares of memorial toast, it made me angry. ATA deaths are never that heroic. An ATA pilot is killed every week flying faulty planes, flying in bad weather, coming down on cracked-up runways—there was that terrible accident where the plane skidded and flipped after landing because of the mud, and by the time people got out to the poor pilot, he’d drowned—stuck upside down in a cockpit full of standing water. HORRIBLE. But not heroic. I’ve never heard of an ATA pilot getting hit by enemy fire. We don’t dogfight. Our bomb bays are empty; our gun sights aren’t connected to anything. Our deaths don’t ever earn us posthumous medals. Drowning in mud, lost at sea, engine failure after takeoff.

So I didn’t believe Felicyta at first—she was so convinced by the mechanic’s letter, but it felt like she was trying to make Celia’s death into a hero’s death, when it was just another faulty aircraft.

“Antiaircraft guns on the ground are good for shooting down flying bombs,” Felicyta said. “But you know the Royal Air Force Tempest squadron takes down as many flying bombs in the air as the gunners do on the ground, and Celia was in a Tempest—”

“She didn’t have any guns,” I said. “She wasn’t armed.” Holy smoke, she didn’t even have a radio. She couldn’t even tell the radio room what was wrong as she was coming in to land.

“You do not need guns,” Felicyta insisted passionately, her eyes blazing. “The mechanic says if you fly fast enough you can ram a pilotless plane with your wingtip.”

We leaned our heads in together over the tiny decorated squares of toast, talking in low tones like conspirators.

“I’ve heard the lads talk about that,” Maddie said. “Doodlebug tipping.”

“In Polish we call it taran—aerial ramming. A Polish pilot rammed a German plane over Warsaw on the first day of the war! The Soviet pilots do it too—same word in Russian. Taran. It is the best way to stop a pilotless plane in the air,” Felicyta said. “Before it reaches a target, when it is still over sea or open country, not over London or Southampton. That is what the Royal Air Force does with their Tempests.”

“But they’re armed!” I insisted.

“You do not need to be armed for taran,” Felicyta said. “You do not need guns to ram another aircraft.”

“She’s right,” Maddie said. “When our lads come up behind a flying bomb and fire at it, they have to fly into the explosion. Absolutely no fun. But if you tip the bomb with your wing before it’s over London, it just dives into a field and there’s no mess.”

I just couldn’t believe Celia would try such a trick, her first time in a Tempest. But, as we all kept saying, we didn’t really know her.

“Would you do it, Maddie?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. It was more of an I don’t know than a no. Maddie’s a very careful pilot and probably has more hours than the rest of us put together. She is the only one of us who is a First Officer. But I realized, just then, that I didn’t really know her, either.

“Felicyta would do it,” Maddie said, avoiding an answer. “Wouldn’t you, Fliss? You see a flying bomb in the sky ahead of you, and you’re flying a Tempest. Would you make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and run the other way? Or try to tip it out of the sky?”

“You know what I would do,” Felicyta said, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t you believe a woman could make a taran as well as a man? You know what I would do, Maddie Brodatt. But I have never met a flying bomb in the air. Have you?”

“Yes,” Maddie said quietly.

We stared at her with wide eyes. I am sure my mouth hung open.

“It was back in June,” she said. “The week after the flying bombs started. I was delivering a Spitfire and I saw it coming toward me, only a couple of hundred feet below me. I thought it was another plane. It looked like another plane. But when I waggled my wings it just stayed on course, and then it passed below me—terribly close—and I realized it was a doodlebug. They aren’t very big. Horrible things, eyeless, just a bomb with wings.”

Pilotless, I thought. Ugh. “Weren’t you scared?”

“Not really—you know how you don’t worry about a near miss until later, when you think about it afterward? It was before I’d heard about anybody tipping a doodlebug, and anyway I hadn’t a hope of catching it. By the time I’d realized what it was, it was just a speck in the distance, still heading for London. I didn’t see it fall.”

I haven’t seen one fall, either, but I’ve heard them. You can hear them THIRTY MILES away, rattling along. Southampton doesn’t get fired on as relentlessly as London and Kent, but we get the miserable things often enough that the noise terrifies me. Like being in the next field over from a big John Deere corn picker: clackety clackety clackety. Then the timer counts down, the engine stops, and for a few seconds you don’t hear anything as the bomb falls. And then you hear the explosion.

I hate to admit this, but I am so scared of the flying bombs that if I’d known about them ahead of time I would not have come. Even after Uncle Roger’s behind-the-scenes scrambling to get the paperwork done for me.

The mechanic says in his letter that he thinks Celia damaged her wing in a separate incident—separate from the crash, “possibly the result of a deliberate brush with another aircraft.” He didn’t actually mention flying bombs. But you could tell the idea was in his head.

Now I am upset all over again, remembering the crash. It took me by surprise, watching—I knew something was wrong, of course, but I never expected her to lose control like that, that close to the ground. It happened so suddenly. I’d been waiting for her so we could come back to Hamble together.

I want to talk to Nick about it. He left a message for me—sweet of him, worrying about me having to go to Celia’s funeral. It’s after nine now, but it’s still light out. They have two hours of daylight saving in the summer here—they call it Double Summer Time. So I’ll walk down to the phone box in the village and hope Nick’s not away on some mission. And that I don’t get told off by his landlady for calling so late.

Horrible war. So much more horrible here than back in the States. Every few weeks someone’s mother or brother or another friend is killed. And already I am fed up with the shortages, never any butter and never enough sleep. The combination of working so hard, and the constant fear, and just the general blahness of everything—I wasn’t prepared for it. But how could I possibly, possibly have been prepared for it? They’ve been living with it for five years. All the time I’ve been swimming at the Lake, playing girls’ varsity basketball and building a tree house for Karl and Kurt like a good big sister, crop dusting with Daddy and helping Mother make applesauce, Maddie’s been delivering fighter planes. When her best friend was killed by a bomb, or whatever it was, eight months ago, I was probably sitting in Mr. Wagner’s creative writing class working out rhyme schemes.

It’s so strange to be here at last, and so different from what I expected.

I have put my accident report into verse after all. (I think I am trying to trick myself into writing this darn thing.) I wish I’d written this poem earlier. It would have been nice to read it at Celia’s service. I will send a copy to her parents.

FOR CELIA FORESTER (by Rose Justice)

The storm will swallow

the brave girl there

who fights destruction

with wings and air—

life and chaos

hover in flight

wingtip to wingtip

until the slight

triumphant moment

when their wings caress

and her crippled Tempest

flies pilotless.

Now that I am an ATA pilot at last, I wish I were a fighter pilot.

August 5, 1944

Hamble, Southampton

And that was the first thing I said to Nick when I got him on the phone. I did get him at last. He wasn’t at home, so I rang the airfield, and they said he was on his way but hadn’t got there yet, AND he was “busy” tonight, so he might not be able to call back. I was so desperate I waited in the phone box for three quarters of an hour till he got in, and we talked for exactly as long as my cigarette tin of pennies held out. In three weeks he will be off to France, and I will not.

“Hello, Rose darling.”

“I want to fly Tempests,” I said through clenched teeth. “I want to be operational. I want to be in the Royal Air Force, blasting flying bombs to smithereens.”

There was a good penny’s worth of silence down the wire before Nick answered. Maybe that’s where the saying comes from, penny for your thoughts. Speak up or the operator will cut you off.

Finally Nick said sympathetically, “What’s made you so bloodthirsty?”

“I’m not bloodthirsty. There’s no blood in a pilotless plane, is there! I’m a good pilot. I’ve probably been flying five years longer than half the boys in 150 Wing. I flew with Daddy from coast to coast across America when I was fifteen, and I did all the navigation. You’ve never flown a Tempest, or a Mustang, or a Mark Fourteen Spitfire—I’ve flown them all, dozens of times. They’re wasting me just because I’m a girl! They won’t even let us fly to France—they’re prepping men for supply and taxi to the front lines, guys with hundreds fewer hours than me, but they’re just passing over the women pilots. It isn’t fair.”

I stopped to breathe. Nick said evenly, “And there’s me, worrying you’d be upset by your friend’s funeral. Instead you’re after shooting down doodlebugs. What’s going on, Rose?”

“How do you topple a doodlebug?” I asked. “The girls say you can do it with your wingtip.”

Nick laughed. Then he paused. I didn’t say anything because I knew he was thinking. “You couldn’t,” he said at last. “Yes, I’ve heard that too, but you need to be flying something fast, not a taxi Anson or a Spitfire with only enough fuel to get you to the maintenance airfield. An ATA pilot couldn’t topple a V-1 flying bomb.”

“Celia did. She tried to, anyway. We think that’s why she crashed. How do they do it? Do you just bash it with your wingtip? The Polish pilots have a word for it. Taran. Aerial ramming.”

Another longish pause. I had stuffed in the entire contents of the cigarette tin right away—after feeding thirty of those gigantic pennies into the telephone it felt like I’d just thrown away a pirate’s treasure hoard. At any rate it added up to more than ten minutes. I didn’t want to be cut off.

And, of course, the operator was probably listening in. Nick’s job is very secret. I didn’t want to get him into trouble.

“No,” he said at last. “No, for God’s sake, don’t try that, Rose, you’ll kill yourself. Is that what Celia did? Good God Almighty. The idea is not to touch them at all. The doodlebug’s a bloody brilliant bomb, but it’s not a brilliant aircraft. It’s unstable, and if you get your wingtip just beneath the bomb’s wing, half a foot or so away from it, you can upset the airflow around its wing and make it stall. But you have to fly fast enough to keep up with it, and it’ll still go off when it hits the ground. Promise me you won’t try?”

My turn to be silent. Because I couldn’t make that promise. I guess I’ll never get the chance anyway, but if I did—well, I’m a better pilot than Celia was.

“Rose, darling?” Nick had to prompt me. “I’m not a fighter pilot either. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

Show-off, quoting Milton. He knows I like poetry.

“That’s garbage, Nick, and you know it,” I said hotly. “You’re not standing and waiting. You’re dropping off—” I choked back what I was going to say, thinking of the operator listening in. I’m not supposed to know what he’s doing, and I don’t know much about it, but Maddie’s boyfriend is in the same squadron—that’s how I met Nick—and you figure a little bit out after a while. They’ve been flying spies and saboteurs and plastic explosive and machine guns in and out of France for the past two years—secret supplies for the D-Day invasion.

“You’re on the front line,” I insisted.

There was this long, guilty silence at the other end.

“Oh, you really are at the Front,” I guessed angrily. “What? They’re going to transfer you, aren’t they, now that the Front’s moved back? Or are they getting the Royal Air Force Special Duties squadron to do ferry work so they can weasel out of sending civilian ATA pilots into Europe?”

“They’re moving the squadron,” Nick gave me cautiously.

I didn’t ask where. He wouldn’t have told me anyway.

“Far?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

That means out of the United Kingdom. Maybe the Mediterranean.

“Well…” Nick hesitated. “We’ve got three days’ leave before we go. It’s not much time, but it matches up with your next two days off. We could get married.”

I am sorry to say that I laughed at him.

I mean, it is just so stupid. He is sweet and funny and kind and brave, and we talk so easily when we are together, and he is so proud to have a pilot for a girlfriend—“Looks like Katharine Hepburn and flies like Amelia Earhart” is how he introduced me to his parents (an exaggeration in both cases, but oh, how I burned with joy and embarrassment when he said it!). But we still haven’t ever even been on a real date, dancing or to a film or anything like that—it’s always lunch in a pub or a quick cup of tea in the coffee shop at the train station just outside Portsmouth, which is halfway for both of us. It is so hard to get time together. Apparently, Maddie has supper with her boyfriend, Jamie, at his air base something like once every two months. And the last time Nick and I had the same day off, I had to stand him up because Uncle Roger and Aunt Edie were taking me out. Of course it never occurred to me to stand up Uncle Roger—but I am in debt to Uncle Roger, I mean morally, for pulling the strings that got me here. Nick doesn’t get that. I know he was hurt.

And now I hurt him again by laughing at his proposal. I tried to make it up to him and promised we would have a whole day, a real day to remember, all to ourselves before he went away.

It makes me angry. Why should it have to be like this, for all of us, all our generation? That the only way for a young couple to be together is to get married? No chance of a honeymoon, no flowers or champagne because the gardens are all full of cabbages and turnips and France is a war zone? No pretty silk dress unless someone manages to steal a parachute for you? No. I know I wouldn’t get married suddenly even if it weren’t wartime. I’d never do it without Daddy there to walk me down the aisle—with nothing more than a telegram to let him know!

It is the same for every young couple. We are all panicking that one of us will be killed next month, next week, tomorrow. All of us panicking that if we don’t do it now, we’ll never get a chance. Well, I don’t care. I’m not letting the war take over my life.

Maddie laughed, too, when I told her about Nick’s proposal.

“I know where he got that idea,” she said. “Jamie and I are getting married on the twelfth of August. Next week!” She gave another hoot of laughter. “That is Nick all over. He’s like a puppy. You said no, didn’t you, Rosie? The poor lad! Tell you what—you can give him a good excuse and say you’ve a previous engagement. Come be my bridesmaid.”

“What, me? Really?”

I was surprised and very pleased, but what a thoughtless thing to say. Her dead friend wasn’t going to do it, was she? And all it did was remind her.

Anyway, of course I will.

I asked her if she knew where Nick and Jamie were going to go, and she gave me a funny look.

“Careless talk costs lives,” she said.

I do know things I shouldn’t. I know a lot about what Uncle Roger is doing, because Aunt Edie tells me. She’s not supposed to know, either. I am a little uncomfortable about it sometimes, but I think they see it as keeping me Ready for Action—Roger always asks for me when he needs to be taxied anywhere. Felicyta thinks it is very funny that this highly important person wants to be piloted by a lowly Third Officer, and a girl at that! He is building pontoons in France at the moment, as the Allies fight their way inland. The next big push will be to cross the Seine. Then Paris.

It’s been a week since Celia’s accident. I have submitted my report. I didn’t draft it on these pretty, gold-edged pages after all, because I didn’t have this notebook with me when I wrote it. The day after her funeral I was stuck at RAF Maidsend for a whole day due to lousy weather, and I couldn’t go home, because there was a top-priority Tempest (of course) that I had to ferry away for repair as soon as the visibility was good enough to fly. It felt a bit ironic, and spooky, to spend the day writing about Celia’s accident and then take off strapped into a broken Tempest. The plane had a big hole punched in the windshield. It was perfectly flyable, but WOW, was it ever windy! Even with goggles on, my face felt like I had frostbite by the time I landed—absolutely frozen. It’s true I was going 225 miles per hour at 3500 feet, but you’d never know it was August. It’s been such a cold summer.

You have to fly that high to get across Kent because you have to be higher than t. . .