Spezia
Spezia, a port city on the Ligurian coast of northwestern Italy, serves as the site of the most devastating single event in the combat career of Colonel Cathcart's bomb group. It is here, during a mission to bomb a disabled Italian cruiser being towed by the Germans, that the mid-air collision killing Nately and eleven other men takes place, an event that shatters Yossarian's remaining will to continue flying and sets in motion the final crisis of the novel.
Strategic Context and the Mission
Intelligence reports that a disabled Italian cruiser in drydock at Spezia will be towed by the Germans to a channel at the harbor entrance and scuttled there to deny the Allied armies deep-water port facilities when they capture the city. For once, a military intelligence report proves accurate. The long vessel is halfway across the harbor when the American bombers fly in from the west. The planes break it apart with direct hits from every flight, filling the crews with waves of enormously satisfying group pride—until they find themselves engulfed in great barrages of flak rising from guns in every bend of the huge horseshoe of mountainous land below. Even Havermeyer, the lead bombardier who prides himself on flying straight and level, resorts to the wildest evasive action he can command when he sees what a vast distance he still has to travel to escape.
The Mid-Air Collision and Nately's Death
Dobbs, at the pilot's controls in his formation, zigged when he should have zagged, skidding his plane into the plane alongside and chewing off its tail. His wing breaks off at the base, and his plane drops like a rock, almost out of sight in an instant. There is no fire, no smoke, not the slightest untoward noise. The remaining wing revolves as ponderously as a grinding cement mixer as the plane plummets nose downward in a straight line at accelerating speed until it strikes the water, which foams open at the impact like a white water lily on the dark-blue sea and washes back in a geyser of apple-green bubbles when the plane sinks. It is over in a matter of seconds. There are no parachutes. And Nately, in the other plane, is killed too. The disaster is too immense to contemplate: twelve men killed.
Aftermath and Consequences
The news of Nately's death almost kills the chaplain, who receives the phone call from the field while laboring over his paperwork. His insides turn at once to dry clay; his hand trembles as he puts the phone down. He prays instinctively that Yossarian, Nately, Hungry Joe, and his other friends will not be listed among the victims, then berates himself repentantly, for to pray for their safety is to pray for the death of other young men he does not even know. At the field, a heavy silence prevails, overpowering motion like a ruthless, insensate spell. Almost two hundred tired, gaunt, downcast men stand holding their parachute packs in a somber and unstirring crowd outside the briefing room, their faces staring blankly in different angles of stunned dejection. The chaplain's eyes search hurriedly, frantically, through the immobile maze of limp figures. He spies Yossarian finally with a feeling of immense joy, and then his mouth gapes open slowly in unbearable horror as he notes Yossarian's vivid, beaten, grimy look of deep, drugged despair. He understands at once, recoiling in pain, that Nately is dead. A sob breaks from him; the blood drains from his legs, and he thinks he is going to drop. Nately's death almost kills Yossarian too, for when he breaks the news to Nately's whore in Rome, she utters a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tries to stab him to death with a potato peeler, beginning a relentless campaign of attempted murder that will pursue him across the rest of the novel.
Narrative Significance
Spezia functions as the novel's point of no return. The collision is the culmination of the escalating mission numbers that Colonel Cathcart has imposed, and it removes the last of Yossarian's close friends—Nately, Dobbs, and the others—from the war. The disaster directly triggers Yossarian's public refusal to fly any more missions, his subsequent deal with Colonel Korn, and his final decision to desert. The location also becomes a recurring reference point in Yossarian's traumatized memory: when he later lies in the hospital after being stabbed, he thinks of Snowden, who had never been his pal but was a vaguely familiar kid who was badly wounded and freezing to death, and the memory of Spezia merges with the earlier trauma of Avignon. The name of the city itself becomes shorthand for the moment when the war's machinery of death finally becomes unbearable.
