Heroes

THE GESTURE (245 pp.)--John Cobb --Harper ($2.75).

Since the early part of 1943 a group of B-17s had been operating from an obscure village 50 miles northeast of London. "We were lucky. . . we only lost one-half of our crews in the first three months."

The men at the field felt they were fighting a force like a tidal wave. They didn't hate the Germans; they had never seen one. Nor were they defending their homes, like the R.A.F.

The men who came back often got drunk and stayed drunk until the next mission. When three-quarters of the original crews had been lost, and the rest were losing their minds, Major Van Luppen, the commanding officer, was recalled to the States. He was enough of a ham to make a farewell speech. But when he said, "We've become something very tough that Heinie doesn't care to tangle with when he doesn't have to," there were guffaws. (They approved when he said drinks were on the house.)

Liberal Fanatic. Into this assemblage of heroes came Major Gregory Harris, a Harvard man, with a year's experience in the State Department, no combat flying, precise features, and a small mustache. He had asked to be transferred from the Air Transport Command because he believed in the war, and in fighting it "violently." He also believed that we could not rationally fight Fascism abroad and not fight against the first steps toward it at home--race prejudice, for example.

When he heard that Negro troops were segregated in a nearby town (there had been some bad riots), he said, "Policies like that are Naziism." He believed that if he, and men like him, failed, the "strong men" (meaning the pilots) would take over: "and then you've got Fascism no matter how you disguise it."

Strong Men. The only trouble with this was that the strong men were not very strong. Nor did they want to take over. Nor, if they had, would it have been Fascism. They did not think it was necessary for the commanding officer to be a Henry Wallace. They wanted to finish their 25 missions and go home. They were young, bewildered, touchy, quarrelsome, dangerous. They had a latent envy, mixed with suppressed contempt, for the men who (like the narrator of The Gesture) had been grounded, and might have flown again but did not. When they came back from a mission, with several planes missing, they walked awkwardly through the sweat-filled briefing room in their coveralls and heavy boots, and "talked in small groups, mostly to each other." At such times they had little to say, even to people who had once flown with them.

Ideological War. When Harris made his first flight, despite his almost complete inability to fly a B17, some of the men developed a grudging respect for him. When he led his formation through the flak, "ordered a 360DEG turn, made the run all over again, bombed the target with great success, and lost one-third of his crews," he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. When Willie Turk, toughest and touchiest of the pilots, talked out of turn, Harris knocked him out with one punch.

Between Harris' fanatic political philosophizing and the bitter, sardonic, common-sense cynicism (and courage) of Willie Turk, there is no possible meeting ground. Harris plays Beethoven in the officers' club. Turk reads comic books in his bunk. Harris talks about Fascism and war as though he had memorized New Republic editorials, but had never really understood them. Turk thinks that all they are doing in the blankety-blank war is blasting half the cows in France, and that the British will not invade Europe until the Russians and Germans have killed each other off. But Turk is a hero and one of the best pilots, with 21 missions to his credit. Harris orders him to bomb a target deep in Bavaria. Turk believes Harris is trying to kill him, wants to set in motion all the dirty work he can to get Harris broken. He finds the task easy when Harris orders Negro troops quartered at the field, and so brings on a first-class riot.

Leadership & Courage. The Gesture is a first novel. Readers may be hard put to it to think of another first novel that grapples with so large a subject and handles it so well. In a sense, The Gesture is the other side of A Bell for Adano, with the well-meaning reformer--Major Jop-polo--as the villain.

The best of The Gesture is its portrait of the airmen. Courage is their party line. Any deviationist is as popular as a Trotskyite in Moscow. Indifferent to appearances in regard to dress, women, discipline, and almost everything else, they nevertheless have an almost mid-Victorian sense of propriety about courage, will not be transferred under even faintly ambiguous circumstances, lest people think they are psychos. The one unforgivable sin is to be called yellow.

Their attitude is a commentary on Harris' leadership, and, beyond Harris, of the national leadership that put them into a conflict so ill-prepared, with so little support, and with so dim a sense of the evil they were fighting against. In consequence, the pilots seem morose and unpleasant; the commanding officers heartless. The reader is forced to remind himself (Author Cobb never does) that they are, after all, heroes.

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