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“new plane smell,” a bouquet of solvents that rivals the “new car smell” for its power to create fond and indelible sensory memories.
    The Flying Fortress had hopped from Presque Isle, Maine, to the Allied air base at Goose Bay, on Canada’s eastern coast, and from there across the Labrador Sea, which separates Canada from Greenland. The big bomber was supposed to continue its eastward journey the following day to Iceland, en route to its final destination, an American airfield in Britain. B-17s were a primary weapon in Allied bombing campaigns against German targets, so new ones were in great demand. Before the war ended, some twelve thousand Flying Fortresses would fill the skies.
    But soon after landing in Greenland, this particular B-17 was diverted from its rendezvous with Nazi Germany.
     
    D URING THE SEVEN years since the first prototype rolled off the assembly line, B-17 bombers had undergone major and minor revisions, from changes in the rudders, flaps, and windows, to being lengthened by ten feet, to having a gunner’s position added to the tail. The plane cooling its engines on the Bluie West One runway was a B-17F, the latest and most advanced Flying Fortress yet.
    The long-range, high-flying bomber was renowned for being able to dish out and take a ferocious amount of punishment, yet still land in one piece. Just over 74 feet long and 19 feet high, it had a wingspan of nearly 104 feet. The B-17F had four engines and room for eight thousand pounds of bombs, almost double the capacity of its E-model predecessor. It flew at up to 325 miles per hour at twenty-five thousand feet, cruised at 160 miles per hour, and had a range of more than 2,000 miles. For protection, it had the heavy armament that spawned its Flying Fortress nickname, with eleven .50-caliber machine guns. It deserved its almost mythic reputation as a bird of war.

    A B-17F FLYING FORTRESS OVER THE ATLANTIC. (U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES PHOTOGRAPH.)
    On bombing runs, a crew of up to ten men would include five machine gunners. A bombardier would sit in the plane’s cone-shaped Plexiglas nose for a bird’s-eye view of potential targets. There, he’d operate the highly classified Norden Bombsight, a computerlike device that guided the delivery of destruction. About a foot high and sixteen inches long, resembling a compact telescope, Norden Bombsights were supposedly able to place a bomb within a hundred-foot circle when dropped from a plane flying at twenty thousand feet. Bombardiers boasted that the device could guide a bomb into a pickle barrel. In fact, the bombsight’s accuracy and its secret weapon status were overstated. Nevertheless, the Norden Bombsight was considered so crucial to the war that American bombardiers took a special oath:
    Mindful of the fact that I am to become guardian of one of my country’s most priceless military assets, the American bombsight . . . I do here, in the presence of Almighty God, swear by the Bombardier’s Code of Honor, to keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and further to uphold the honor and integrity of the Army Air Forces, if need be, with my life itself.
    The bomber that landed at Bluie West One on November 5, 1942, had a new Norden Bombsight, even though it had yet to be assigned a bombardier. It had machine guns, but didn’t yet have machine gunners. It didn’t have a nickname—fierce, like Cyanide for Hitler , or glamorous, like Smokey Liz , or goofy, like Big Barn Smell . And it didn’t yet have a curvaceous Vargas girl painted below the pilot’s window. All that would come with its permanent crew.
    For the moment, the new and unpedigreed bomber was the ward of the Air Transport Command, a military shuttle service whose job was to ferry planes to U.S. and overseas bases. Until its combat crew came on board, the untested bomber would be known by its serial number, 42-5088, or more often by its prosaic radio call sign, PN9E.
     
    A FTER THE RADIO