Bologna mission evasive action

The second mission to Bologna was the mission on which the war stopped being a game of survival and became a trap. After the first attempt had been a milk run—no flak at all—Colonel Cathcart sent the men back the next day, and the Germans were waiting. Yossarian, flying as lead bombardier with McWatt, found himself lured, lulled, and then caught in the heaviest concentration of antiaircraft fire the group had ever encountered. It was the moment when his fear crystallized into a cold, operational certainty: the system was not just indifferent to his death; it was actively conspiring to bring it about.

The Trap Is Sprung

Yossarian came in on the target like Havermeyer, confidently taking no evasive action at all, and suddenly they were shooting the living shit out of him. Heavy flak was everywhere. He had been lulled, lured, and trapped, and there was nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and watch the ugly black puffs smashing up to kill him. He was trembling steadily as the plane crept ahead, his head bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop. He wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy fly. At last the indices on the bombsight crossed, tripping away the eight 500-pounders one after the other. The plane lurched upward buoyantly with the lightened load. Yossarian bent away from the bombsight crookedly to watch the indicator on his left. When the pointer touched zero, he closed the bomb bay doors and, over the intercom, at the very top of his voice, shrieked: "Turn right hard!"

The Evasive Frenzy

McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl of engines, he flipped the plane over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in a screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing toward them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and higher until they tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky. The wind strummed soothingly against the cylindrical panes of his windows, and he relaxed exultantly only until they picked up speed again and then turned McWatt left and plunged him right back down, noticing with a transitory spasm of elation the mushrooming clusters of flak leaping open high above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where he could have been if he had not turned left and dived. He leveled McWatt out with another harsh cry and whipped him upward and around again into a ragged blue patch of unpolluted air just as the bombs he had dropped began to strike. The first one fell in the yard, exactly where he had aimed, and then the rest of the bombs from his own plane and from the other planes in his flight burst open on the ground in a charge of rapid orange flashes across the tops of the buildings, which collapsed instantly in a vast, churning wave of pink and gray and coal-black smoke.

Aarfy's Indifference and the Plane Hit

In the midst of the chaos, Aarfy, Yossarian's plump, pipe-smoking navigator, remained a maddening, immovable presence. Yossarian screamed at him to get out of the nose, but Aarfy shrugged amiably, claiming he couldn't hear. Yossarian seized him by the straps of his parachute harness and pushed him backward toward the crawlway just as the plane was hit with a jarring concussion that rattled his bones and made his heart stop. He knew at once they were all dead. "Climb!" he screamed into the intercom at McWatt when he saw he was still alive. "Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!" The plane zoomed upward again in a climb that was swift and straining, until he leveled it out with another harsh shout at McWatt and wrenched it around once more in a roaring, merciless forty-five-degree turn that sucked his insides out in one enervating sniff and left him floating fleshless in mid-air. Through endless blobs of ghostly black smoke he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth plexiglass nose of the ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart was hammering again in aching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the sky at him.

The Revelation of Orr

The plane was slammed again suddenly with another loud, jarring explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire! Yossarian whirled to escape and smacked into Aarfy, who had struck a match and was placidly lighting his pipe. Yossarian gaped at his grinning, moon-faced navigator in utter shock and confusion. It occurred to him that one of them was mad. Then, as the flak finally ended and they were alive, someone asked over the intercom, "Where's Orr?" Yossarian bounded up with a one-syllable cry that crackled with anxiety and provided the only rational explanation for the whole mysterious phenomenon of the flak at Bologna: Orr! He lunged forward over the bombsight to search downward through the plexiglass for some reassuring sign of Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had undoubtedly attracted the crack batteries of the whole Hermann Goering Division to Bologna overnight from wherever the hell they had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in Rome. At last Yossarian spotted the two-engined, twin-ruddered plane as it flew out of the green background of the forests over a field of yellow farmland. One of the propellers was feathered and perfectly still, but the plane was maintaining altitude and holding a proper course. Yossarian muttered an unconscious prayer of thankfulness and then flared up at Orr savagely in a ranting fusion of resentment and relief. "That bastard!" he began. "That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, curly-headed, buck-toothed rat bastard son of a bitch!"

Aftermath and Significance

Back at the briefing room, Yossarian made his intelligence report to Captain Black and then waited in muttering suspense with all the others until Orr chugged into sight overhead finally with his one good engine still keeping him aloft gamely. Nobody breathed. Orr's landing gear would not come down. Yossarian hung around only until Orr had crash-landed safely, and then stole the first jeep he could find with a key in the ignition and raced back to his tent to begin packing feverishly for the emergency rest leave he had decided to take in Rome. The Bologna mission was a watershed. It proved to Yossarian that the flak was not random; it was personal, drawn by the very presence of men like Orr and orchestrated by the ambitions of men like Cathcart. The evasive action he took was not heroism but a desperate, animalistic fight for survival, and it left him with no illusions. He would not be a willing participant in his own destruction any longer.