Yossarian's second bomb run over Ferrara

Yossarian's second bomb run over Ferrara is the novel's most concentrated demonstration of the lethal absurdity at the heart of combat: a bombardier who does his job perfectly and is rewarded for it, yet whose success is inseparable from the death of men he barely knew. The mission was the climax of a week-long ordeal. Colonel Cathcart had volunteered his group to destroy the bridge spanning the Po at Ferrara, and for six straight days the group had failed. On the seventh day, Yossarian led his flight of six B-25s in over the target. His navigator, Aarfy, was confused, and Yossarian was unable to drop his bombs on the first pass. The other five bombardiers dropped their bombs and missed. Yossarian then made the decision to go around a second time, taking his flight back into the concentrated antiaircraft fire that had been waiting for them. He buried his head in the bombsight until the bombs were away; when he looked up, everything inside the ship was suffused in a weird orange glow. He saw the plane with the burning engine directly above him and screamed to McWatt to turn left hard. A second later, the wing of Kraft's plane blew off. The flaming wreck dropped, first the fuselage, then the spinning wing, while a shower of tiny metal fragments began tap dancing on the roof of Yossarian's own plane and the flak kept thumping all around him. The bridge was destroyed, but Kraft and his crew were dead.

The Aftermath and the Medal

Back on the ground, Yossarian walked in dull dejection to make his intelligence report. Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn were waiting to speak to him inside the briefing room. Colonel Cathcart was all broken up by the event, not by the loss of life but by how it would look on the report. "Twice?" he asked. Yossarian replied softly that he would have missed the first time. Colonel Cathcart repeated the question in vivid disbelief, and Yossarian repeated his answer. The colonel reminded him that a trained bombardier is supposed to drop his bombs the first time, and that the other five bombardiers had done so. Yossarian pointed out that they had missed the target. Colonel Cathcart was baffled and distressed, lamenting that it looked so lousy on the report. It was Yossarian himself who timidly suggested, "Why don't you give me a medal?" Colonel Cathcart initially scoffed, saying he would be lucky if they didn't give him a court-martial. But Colonel Korn, with a reflective, self-satisfied smile, proposed giving him a medal for going around twice, arguing that it took a lot of courage to go over that target a second time with no other planes around to divert the antiaircraft fire, and that acting boastfully about something they ought to be ashamed of was a trick that never seemed to fail. Colonel Cathcart agreed, and they promoted Yossarian to captain as well. Colonel Korn put his arm around Yossarian's shoulders and said, "Exit smiling."

Thematic Significance: The Corruption of Valor

The Ferrara mission establishes the pattern for every subsequent moral compromise in the novel. Yossarian's act of bravery—the second bomb run—is real, but it is immediately appropriated by the institutional machinery of Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn for their own advancement. The medal and promotion are not rewards for heroism but tools to cover up a tactical blunder and a loss of life. This is the first time Yossarian is made complicit in the system's lies, and it haunts him. The memory of Kraft, "a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked," becomes a recurring guilt. Yossarian feels guilty because Kraft was killed on his second bomb run, and guilty because Kraft had got mixed up innocently also in the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection. The event also forges the cynical partnership between Yossarian and his commanders that culminates in the "like us" deal. Later, when Yossarian refuses to fly more missions, Colonel Cathcart threatens to court-martial him for incompetence over Ferrara, even though he gave him a medal for it. The Ferrara mission is the original sin of Yossarian's war, the moment his survival and his integrity first came into irreconcilable conflict.