“Valhalla Express”

Valhalla Express is the Colonel’s name for a long formation of Allied bombers, an image that joins the spectacle of air power to the confusion and cost of a friendly-fire bombing. He first presents the aircraft as a beautiful procession crossing the sky from England toward the east; as the account unfolds, the name also becomes a way of remembering how the bombing that was meant to clear German positions fell on his own side. The phrase’s grandeur persists, but it cannot make the event’s consequences less troubling.

The Name and Its Image

The Colonel says that the aircraft were still taking off from the fields where they lived on England, which he likens to a green-grassed aircraft carrier, when the men on the ground saw the first of them. He remembers the planes as shining and beautiful, but immediately qualifies the image: by then, perhaps they had scraped off their invasion paint, or perhaps they had not. His memory, he admits, is not exact on that point. The uncertainty is part of the recollection: the procession’s scale and appearance remain vivid, while a detail about the aircraft cannot be fixed.

What he can recall clearly is the line of planes stretching eastward beyond sight. It looked, he tells his daughter, like a great train, high in the sky and never more beautiful. He says that he told his S-2 they should call it the Valhalla Express. The name turns a military formation into a moving image of immense reach: a train whose carriages are aircraft and whose route runs from England toward the front. His daughter responds that she can picture it, although neither of them had seen the planes in such numbers. She had nevertheless seen them many times. The name therefore belongs both to this particular remembered spectacle and to an image familiar from repeated wartime sightings.

The Bombing and the Reversal

The column appears while the troops are still two thousand yards from the point from which they are to attack. The Colonel emphasizes the distance to his daughter, who says she cannot know what two thousand yards means in an attack. The aircraft’s first action seems to confirm their promise as support: the leading planes release colored smoke and turn back toward home. The smoke accurately marks the German positions. Those positions are strong, the Colonel explains, and may have been difficult to dislodge without an intervention as forceful and dramatic as the one unfolding above them.

The succeeding sections of bombers then drop their loads on the German forces and the places where they live and work to hold up the advance. In the Colonel’s account, the bombardment appears to have achieved its immediate purpose. The prisoners taken afterward shake uncontrollably; he compares their reaction to the onset of malaria and notes that they try, unsuccessfully, to master it. He calls the bombing good and describes its effect as making the enemy tremble before justice and might. That confidence, however, depends on the smoke continuing to mark the enemy’s positions—and the wind changes what the smoke means.

The wind is from the east, so the smoke begins to blow back toward the attackers. The bombers continue working along the smoke line, which has now moved over the Colonel’s force. The heavy bombers strike the friendly troops as they had struck the Germans; the mediums then come over and bomb those left. The Colonel recounts the sequence plainly, without separating the event’s spectacle from its error. Only after the Valhalla Express has gone home do the troops make their breakthrough. The line of aircraft, described as stretching in beauty and majesty from France across England, thus frames a costly reversal: the same operation that helps open the way forward also bombs the attackers.

Memory, Conscience, and Cost

The Colonel’s account holds two judgments together. The bombing helps make the breakthrough possible, yet the smoke that identifies the target shifts over the men who are advancing. His description of the planes as beautiful does not undo that failure of distinction; nor does the success of the attack erase the fact that the bombers struck both sides. He recalls his own thought that a man with a conscience might think about air power. The thought turns the story from a report of military effectiveness into a question of responsibility for what that power does, including when its effects fall on one’s own troops.

Later, he tells his daughter not to be bitter, then immediately recalls that General McNair was killed by mistake on the day the Valhalla Express came over. He does not provide further circumstances or identify who caused McNair’s death, but the recollection makes the day’s mistaken killing part of the name’s wider burden. His attempt to restrain bitterness falters into the question of how he can remember without it. The expression consequently carries more than the planes’ scale or their apparent success: it also marks the difficulty of keeping a grand image intact when the memory attached to it includes friendly fire, mistaken death, and the enduring need to tell what happened.