"Time To Wake Up Now"*

This video reminded me of an essay written by MacKinlay Kantor in which he tells about one of the bombing missions he was on over Germany, and of the aftermath of a V-2 strike on London.
"That’s what happened if you were within a certain radius of the spot where a V-2 came down. You died quickly and explosively, but it was only air which killed you: blast air. If a building fell on you, you would be squashed flat, but this blast air came just as hard as a building falling on you. It crushed your chest and still it didn’t leave a mark. ...
...So you stood beside her and you said, “Wake up, dear. Please wake up.” You said it very softly so as not to awaken her too abruptly; but she didn’t stir; and you had to keep whispering it and whispering it with your lips and in your mind."


Here is MacKinlay Kantor's entire essay: 

 

Time To Wake Up Now---1945

 

That chilly March afternoon we got back from Germany around four o’clock, and promptly I went to my barracks and packed up for Paris.  I was leaving the 344th Group of medium bombers, based at that time in a windy valley stretching from Cormeilles to Genicourt.

 

The 344th- especially the 495th Squadron, with which I had been flying-boasted a swell bunch of boys, and I was sorry to leave them.  (Editorial Note by Author, 1967—Funny.  Every squadron I ever flew with, in two wars, seemed like “A swell bunch of boys.”  Shows I’m queer for squadrons.)

 

But more than that I found myself worrying about a gang of Germans I had never even seen or talked with.

 

Maybe they were good Germans; I didn’t know.  I was convinced that a lot of them must now be good Germans in the traditional sense of the word (borrowed from our pioneer past:  i.e., the only good Indian is a dead Indian).  The trouble was, I couldn’t decide just how good those Germans at Olpe were, in the more ordinary sense of the word, before our B-26s came flashing overhead that afternoon.

 

We hadn’t intended to go to Olpe.  We had been briefed for a target called Bad Oyenhausen, away up northeast of Hamm.  The boys made a lot of cracks about this, naturally:  they said they’d rather go to Good Oyenhausen, if such a place there were.  Bad Germans, good Germans, Bad Oyenhausen, Good Oyenhausen…it was all rather mixed up in my mind.

 

As we twisted along the narrow road toward Paris in Colonel Witty’s car, I considered the facts of the matter.  Some friends named Durato and Fender and Brady were riding with me, and we had a bottle of rather green cognac.  Fender had finished his missions that day, so of course he was planning a celebration; indeed was already embarked upon it.  I could talk with the others, and take an occasional swig with them.

 

I wished that I could get over being concerned about those Germans at Olpe. 

 

I had flown with a very sharp pilot named Ehart, and I remembered how we all cussed when the order for diversion came crackling in over the radio.  We were across the bomb line by that time, or almost.  I know that we were across the Rhine, and in those faraway days of March our bomb line still lay close to the Rhine.  A bomb line is an imaginary barrier set up for the protection of ground forces; it is changed from hour to hour.  You cannot drop your bombs on the nearer side of the bomb line: only on the farther side, for fear of killing your own troops on the ground.  Sometimes mistakes are made.  That’s the way General Lesley McNair got killed.

 

Anyway we were diverted, and at first we thought we were going to have to turn around and go home, but more information followed.  We were told to attack Olpe instead of Bad Oyenhausen.

 

That was fine.  Olpe was close at hand, and Bad Oyenhausen was a long way off, and we had been warned about a lot of Luftwaffe in those northeastern areas.  So we would proceed at once to Olpe and get rid of our bombs on top of the road junction there; and we would receive credit for a mission after all. And we would be home before we had expected.  As the RAF would say, “Good show, good show!”

 

Well, we reached Olpe in short order; our window-ship was right ahead.  When I saw his bomb doors pull down, I went back and opened the door into our bomb bay.  I had always enjoyed watching bombs fall on our enemies.  In the 17s I never got to see much of that sort of thing, because there I flew as right-cheek gunner in the nose.  Our bomb doors were wide open when I looked, and patches of cloud scudded past a couple of thousand feet beneath.  Even as I looked, the bombardier pressed his switch up forward, and the big brown plummets sank rapidly and purposefully toward the overcast.  Then miraculously clouds opened  to admit them.  And I saw Olpe—a little place with a lot of peaked gable roofs, pinkish tile roofs, such as they have in most of those towns in western Germany.  I thought again, “Good Show,” and closed the door, and went up front to watch the flak which was already beginning to appear in startled black and silver buffets ahead of us and below us and to the left. 

 

Also I started to worry about those Germans on the ground. 

 

I imagined many old ladies, and they were simple dumb honest souls.  They had the kind of wrinkled Teutonic faces which you see on old farm wives in Pennsylvania counties…their teeth gone, the flesh on their lips all squeezed like brown flower petals around their thin mouths; and their little blue eyes were bright, as I thought of them.  They wore lace caps, or maybe shawls over their heads, and they liked to keep coffeepots warm and ready on the backs of their stoves.  They had flowers growing in spring gardens and maybe there were kids who called them Grossmutter.

 

Then I started worrying about the kids.  I saw them with yellow hair and engaging little faces, and I imagined them playing with cats or maybe picking up bright pebbles in the road to play with on their mother’s doorsteps.  I put myself down in Olpe.  I stood around while the bombs went wham and the bricks flew this way and that way, and the concussion blasted my ears.  I thought I heard people crying. 

 

This wasn’t like bombing those flak gun positions south of Limburg, which we had attacked the previous Sunday when I was flying with Tal Pearson.  Then we were after our old flak enemies—those bastards who threw the black-and-silver at us, and had at one time or another torn to bits certain airplanes that we loved and certain people who rode in them—people whom we loved also.  No; and it wasn’t like attacking a Jerry fighter field or a locomotive works which had been reconditioned to make Messerschmitts.  This was attacking a town with harmless civilians in it.  Our bombs had undoubtedly closed (for the moment) a very important transportation bottleneck.  But a lot noncombatants must have been killed. 

 

These thoughts lingered unpleasantly with me all afternoon.  They didn’t vanish even after we reached the cool tired misshapen boundaries of Paris and felt a thin spring sunset on our faces.

 

I went to my hotel lugubriously.  When I found that I couldn’t have a room to myself I was more lugubrious than ever.

 

The concierge shook his head, and got out a register with a long list of names on a certain page.  “All the singles are taken.  You’ll have to move in with someone who’s already registered in a double room.  Do you know any of these people, Monsieur?”

 

Halfway down the list I saw the name of Grammer, S.

 

“Is that Stan Grammer from Press Wireless?”

 

“Mais oui.”

 

“O.K.  I’ll move in with him.  I’ve known him for years.”

 

And so I had, and so had most of the other correspondents in the ETO.  Stan Grammer is a dapper Englishman, middle-aged, and he manipulates Press Wireless with a skillful hand.  I used to know him in London earlier in the war, when he wore civilian clothes, when we used to play poker down at the Savoy night after night while the sirens screeched outside and the windows shook in their casings.

 

Now Stan was wearing an American correspondent’s uniform, people had told me, with his Raf wings from the last war neatly stitched on the right breast of his blouse; and I supposed that he must be having a very good time in this war, because I was sure that he rather liked war.

 

The concierge said, as the porter gathered up in my bags, “You are fortunate.  You will have the room to yourself, after all.  Monsieur Grammer is with the Army at the Front—has been, for weeks.”

 

About ten o’clock I finished with dinner and with what reading I had to do; I crawled into one of the two beds in our room, and smoked for a while.  I contemplated the miscellaneous chunks of luggage piled on top of the wardrobes, and I guessed rightly that Stan Grammer’s room was a repository for stray bits of personal belongings left there by other correspondents who had drifted off in one direction or another.  I say, I tried to count the pieces of luggage and speculate as to their contents; but I couldn’t get those old Grossmuttern and minor yellow-haired Maedchen out of my head.

 

Finally I turned off the light and went to sleep, but that gang of Germans came all the way from Olpe and climbed into bed and crowded me.  They were dead and bloody, and still crying as if their hearts would break.

 

Then I was awake, and it was twelve o’clock.  Someone was pounding on the door which I had bolted before I went to bed.  I got up and tramped groggily to the door and I looked out into the hall.  There stood Stan Grammer and a porter with Stan’s luggage, and we blinked at one another for a few seconds and then I welcomed him into his own room.  The porter went away, and still Stan and I were saying that it was good to see each other again.  I got out what was left of my cognac and we had a couple of drinks. 

 

“How are things up at the Front?” I asked him, but even then I was wondering why he had that big wad of cotton sticking out of his right ear. 

 

“Front, hell,” said Stan.  “Who said I’d been at the Front?”

 

“The concierge.”

 

“Nonsense. I’ve been home; on leave, in Britain.”

 

I told him, “I’m going over tomorrow or next day, to go back to the 305th.”

 

He made a wry face.  “See that you go quickly to Chelveston, old boy.  Don’t linger in London.  It’s not nice.”

 

“What do you mean?  V-2s?”

 

“They’ve been damn bad all week.  Look at this.”  Stan touched the cotton protruding from his ear.

 

“What’s the matter with your ear?  Don’t tell me you got hit?”

 

He walked around the room, swishing the brown cognac in his glass.  It was chilly; I got back into bed and watched him. 

 

“No,” he said.  “I didn’t get hit.  It was concussion.  It cracked my eardrum.  It’s painful, and a damn nuisance, too.  I have to keep putting medication in my ear.”

 

He said, “Larry Rue and I were just coming out of the Savoy when the thing hit.  It was up in High Holborn.  It was just about noon.”

 

I watched him twisting a tuft of cotton into a sharp point between his thumb and first finger. 

 

“You know how the Savoy is:  There’s that little court where you come in off the Strand?  We were in that court, and I guess that made the difference.  The concussion gave us a bloody hard wallop.  I didn’t realize anything had happened to my ear at the time; but later it got to making noises and paining me, so I went to a doctor.”

 

He drank the last of his cognac, put down the glass, and began to take off his clothes.  “God,” he said, “I’m tired! Frightfully tired.  I had a frightful time getting back to Paris, frightful trouble with transportation.  All the damn fools there are in world…I’m sick of this bloody war.  Aren’t you?”

 

He put on his pajamas and got out the medicine with which to dose his ear, and went into the bathroom.  I picked up a cold cigar butt on the ashtray beside my bed, lighted it, and lay there with my hands behind my head, until Stan came back and began to turn down the other bed,  He said, “We counted one hundred and ninety-six bodies.”

 

“In High Holborn?”

 

“Yes,” he said, crawling into bed.  “It was about noon, and all those old clerks and little office girls were just going out for their bite of lunch.  The street was full of them, when the thing came down.”

 

…It was the girl in the light blue dress that bothered him more than the others, I think.  He kept talking about her after we switched out the lights, and lay there marked only by the orange stare of our respective cigar and cigarette.

 

It was the little girl in the blue dress, and she had a kind of pink bow on the dress—rather like a necktie—and her hair was brown.

 

Stan said that they hurried to High Holborn after they had gulped back their breath; and they stood around and watched—watched the ARPs and the ambulances—watched  London taking charge of its dead and its living in that kind of fumblingly, bumblingly efficient manner which London employed in such matters all through the war.  Stan said that many of the bodies didn’t have a mark on them.  No blood, no wounds, no nothing.

 

That’s what happened if you were within a certain radius of the spot where a V-2 came down.  You died quickly and explosively, but it was only air which killed you: blast air.  If a building fell on you, you would be squashed flat, but this blast air came just as hard as a building falling on you.  It crushed your chest and still it didn’t leave a mark. 

 

So all the prissy, middle-aged clerks, shabby grey bookkeepers in their shiny office coats, they were laid out in rows on the sidewalk, and so were the women laid out.  The fat old dame with straggly hair, who’d just stepped out of the milk bar around the corner; and the trim young upper-class mother in her rough tweed suit, and the two little kids who had been tripping along the street with her, and had tripped into Infinity fresh-faced and capable by their mother's side.  And all the little Waafs and Ats who had errands in the neighborhood, they were laid out, too—the Ats with the ugly yellow-ribbed stockings which would never worry them again, the blue and khaki uniforms in slow-settling plaster and brick dust.

 

The two-day-old carnation in the worn lapel; the shabby well-mended shopping bag; the Malacca walking stick; the crumpled pink handkerchief that it cost a coupon to buy.  They were all there on that sidewalk in High Holborn, said Stan Grammer; and distant bells pealed the cry of noon, and dust drifted its powder on everyone who came into the area. 

 

And there lay the girl in blue dress, the one whom Stan admired, the one he talked about so much.  I guess that maybe he fell in love with her after she was killed…he’d never known her before.

 

She had brown hair and lashes, and her eyes were properly closed: they weren’t open and staring.  They weren’t the peeled-grape kind of eyes which dead people have so often.  They were just pretty sleepy-time eyes with soft heavy lids and lovely long lashes; and the girl in the blue dress was sound asleep.

 

…He said that she might have lain that way on a couch.  You could imagine that you loved her, because she was so very young and had such a candy-flower smell about her, and her legs were very pretty too; the knees were especially nice.  You could see her knees because the dress was pulled up rather high as she lay there amid a powder of window-glass.

 

You could imagine that she was on a couch, and perhaps you and she had been making love; and then you had both gone to sleep, and then you awakened and looked over and saw her.  She was still asleep—brown hair and white little ears and slim throat and everything.

 

So you stood beside her and you said, “Wake up, dear.  Please wake up.”  You said it very softly so as not to awaken her too abruptly; but she didn’t stir; and you had to keep whispering it and whispering it with your lips and in your mind.

 

“She was very beautiful,” Stan said, there in the dark; and then he turned over and rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Just as if she were asleep.  You couldn’t believe that she was dead. God,” he said, “I do hate the Germans, don’t you?”

 

“Yes,” I said. 

 

“Just as if she were asleep.” Said Stan, turning over in his bed and flouncing around until he made himself comfortable.  “You wanted to keep asking her to wake up.  You wanted to say, ‘Wake up, dear. You’ve been asleep a long time.  It’s time to wake up now.’ ”

 

The smoke arose from his cigarette ash a few minutes longer; I could smell it; I had put out my cigar sometime before.  Finally I heard Stan snoring, and then I turned over and went to sleep.

 

From: The Day I Met A Lion; MacKinlay Kantor, Doubleday, 1968