A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (24 page)

Charlie jumped in the passenger’s seat. Sergeant Dick Pechout, Charlie’s radio operator, sat behind the wheel. Pechout was from Connecticut and had a slender face and small but plump lips that defined
his face. “Drive!” Charlie ordered. Pechout raced toward Pyote, just minutes north of the field. Along the way, he tried to apologize for disturbing Charlie’s date. Charlie cut him off. “Dick, I know you weren’t involved, so don’t bother.” Charlie knew Pechout was a techie from Connecticut who loved his radio so much he would have preferred to stay in the barracks examining its tubes and transistor chips rather than go hell-raising on the town.

Pyote resembled the set of a western film. The main street held a dozen buildings, each separated by vast empty lots. The buildings all had covered walkways and railings where horses could be tied. Charlie imagined that cowboys once rode down the center of the street, shooting up the place. Now servicemen stumbled between saloons, steadied by their buddies.

Charlie spotted a bar with two MP jeeps parked out front at odd angles, as if they had been parked in a hurry. Charlie hopped out and told Ecky to stay and Pechout to keep the jeep running. He bolted onto the porch outside the bar and stood aside as an MP barreled out the door, leading an airman who held a raw steak over half his face. A sobbing girl followed the injured man.

Inside, Charlie hacked from the gray cloud of cigarette smoke that rickety fans pushed down from a high ceiling. He spotted two MPs questioning Blackie and Russian in a corner. Nearby, a flipped table rested on edge.

Charlie was not surprised to see Blackie sitting there smirking, even as the MPs questioned him. Sergeant Sam “Blackie” Blackford was Charlie’s ball turret gunner, a talkative Kentuckian whose face was always scrunched by a mischievous grin. Thanks to his backwoods upbringing, Blackie was a Davy Crockett type, as rough and tough as he was personable. No one wanted Blackie’s job—to operate the twin guns slung in a metal ball beneath the bomber’s belly—except Blackie. But everyone wanted Blackie down there because his dark eyes were the sharpest among the crew.

Charlie pushed his way through the crowd and stepped cautiously over broken glass. When Blackie saw Charlie approaching, his eyes lit up. When Russian saw him coming, he leaned his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling.

Charlie knew Russian was better than such behavior, and Russian knew it, too. Sergeant Alex “Russian” Yelesanko was a tall, burly kid from Pennsylvania whose Russian-looking features reflected his ancestry—a sharp downturned nose, a strong chin, and big balled-up cheeks. Russian looked like a grown man compared to the others and was the crew’s right waist gunner, probably because the waist was the only spot in the bomber big enough to hold him. The crew liked Russian because he was tough but kind. Charlie liked him because he was usually mature.

Charlie approached the two uniformed MPs and tapped the seniormost MP, the one with a sergeant’s stripes, on the shoulder. The MP and Charlie saluted each other. Standing ramrod straight, Charlie said in his most authoritative tone, “I’m placing these men under arrest!” The MPs looked at each other, confused, having never heard of a pilot apprehending his own crew. Before the MPs could object, Charlie shook a finger at Blackie and Russian and in his most enraged tone snapped, “Exit this facility, immediately!” Blackie and Russian quickly stood up and left the bar, while looking back to see if Charlie was joking.

Turning to the MPs, Charlie said, “Thank you, gentlemen.” He then spun and walked away. The MPs watched him leave as their minds tried to catch up to what had just transpired.

Outside the bar, Charlie pushed Blackie and Russian toward the jeep’s backseat. Jumping into the passenger’s seat, Charlie shouted to Pechout, “Drive!” As Pechout put the jeep in gear, Charlie purposely did not look back, in case the MPs had changed their minds and followed him out. Blackie and Russian rode in silence while Ecky held on to Russian to keep from falling out.

During the drive, Charlie asked the men, “Was it over a girl?” He was waiting for them to say yes and was prepared to pounce on them with a lecture about how their “skirt chasing” cost him his date.

“Yes and no,” Blackie said.

Charlie turned, perturbed, his glare asking for a straight story.

“Ecky went to the bar for a beer and made the mistake of standing near two drunks showing off for their girls,” Blackie spouted. “One of them spilled half his beer on Ecky and he came back all wet.” Charlie looked to Ecky, who nodded.

“It wasn’t that they spilled it on him,” Russian said. “It was that they didn’t apologize or buy Ecky a beer.”

“So we made ’em apologize,” Blackie said with a grin.

Charlie turned forward to hide a smirk. He asked the men what happened to Jennings.

“Jennings helped us, sir,” Russian said.

Charlie smiled in the darkness as the jeep pulled through the airfield’s gate.
^*
The perfect record of “the Quiet Ones” was still intact.

C
HARLIE AND
M
ARJORIE
met the next night and spent much of the ensuing two days together whenever Charlie was not flying. They grabbed lunch, went on walks, and met for drinks in the O-Club.
^†

On their last night together, Charlie walked Marjorie to her quarters. On the porch of her barracks, under a light that swarmed with bugs, Marjorie handed Charlie an empty matchbook. Looking inside, Charlie saw she had written her address at Romulus Army Air Field. She asked Charlie to write to her, so they could see each other again
someday. Charlie grinned and promised he would have his first letter in the mail before her wheels touched down in Detroit. They kissed, and Charlie walked away into the dark.

A MONTH LATER, LATE OCTOBER 1943, CHICAGO

From the train car on the tracks of the train yard, Charlie and his officers peered through a window. Eerie street lamps lined the deserted platform. Charlie and Pinky sat across from Doc and Andy. They all held Cokes in bottles. Their enlisted men sat in cars farther back on the tracks. In his pocket, Charlie carried his crew’s orders to a staging camp in New Jersey called Camp Kilmer. From there, he and his officers assumed they would sail by ship to Europe.

A whistle tooted. Steam rose up outside their window. The men knew the train was aiming eastward, but only when the train’s pistons began pumping and its wheels cranking did they celebrate.

“Europe!” they shouted, backslapping one another. No bomber crews wanted to go west to the Pacific, where too much water lay between tiny island airfields. Charlie, in particular, feared the Japanese, after hearing stories of the atrocities they committed against captured airmen.

Charlie and his crew debated their ultimate destination. Charlie hoped they were headed to England and to the unit from the newsreels—the 8th Air Force. Pinky hoped they were headed to the Mediterranean, where the Allies had recently invaded Italy.

“There’s plenty of Germans to bomb there,” Pinky said, “And the best part is you don’t have to fly over Germany to do it.” The men debated Italian wine versus English beer, London versus Salerno, Italian mud versus English fog.

The debate abruptly ended when someone said, “What about Black Thursday?” The men grew silent. They had all heard the rumors leaking from bases in England. Only weeks prior, on Thursday,
October 14, the 8th Air Force had lost sixty bombers—six hundred men—in one raid over Schweinfurt, Germany. It was the first battle that the 8th Air Force had acknowledged they lost.

“Okay, Italy it is,” Charlie and his officers agreed, clanging bottles in cheers to the mud of the Mediterranean.

*
Charlie would remember, “It was a true cowboy town and people on horseback used to come out to watch us fly as if they sensed some strange kinship between their horses and ours.”

*
“It was a strange-looking pilot—a very attractive female!” Charlie would remember, “It sort of shocked me, but was a very pleasant shock.”

*
“In fighting for one man, they were really sticking up for the entire crew’s honor,” Charlie would remember. “I couldn’t condone that behavior and give them the wrong idea, but I was proud of them.”

† “I was a gentleman and didn’t try to get her in bed or anything like that,” Charlie would remember. “It was really a pleasant, old-fashioned relationship.”

TWO MONTHS LATER, DECEMBER 20, 1943, CENTRAL ENGLAND

I
N HIS CORNER
bunk at the end of the long metal hut, Charlie tossed and turned. From the cracks in the windows’ blackout paper, he guessed it was the middle of the night, maybe 3
A.M.
He knew he needed to get back to sleep. His second combat run to Germany was a sunrise away. A week earlier he had flown his first mission as a new member of the 379th Bomb Group. He had flown with another crew then, as copilot to a veteran pilot. This “introductory mission” was meant to acclimate a pilot to combat before he embarked over Germany with his own crew. During the mission, German fighters had passed above the formation Charlie flew in and beat up those behind him. The B-17 Charlie rode in bombed the submarine pens at the German port city of Bremen and came back without a scratch. The mission prompted Charlie to think,
Maybe this bombing gig isn’t all that
bad.

Charlie pulled his blanket up to his chin. The room was freezing with an arched ceiling that seemed to trap the cold. Pinky snored in
the bunk next to him, and other officers could be heard in their bunks throughout the hut. Engines belched in the distance as mechanics worked throughout the night to ensure that every plane was ready for the mission. Other men laughed as they walked by the hut, their voices traveling through the thin steel walls, probably the cooks on their way to fire up the mess hall. Charlie heard the squeaking brakes of trucks hauling bombs to their planes. Every sound kept Charlie from returning to sleep. The door to the hut creaked open. Footsteps followed.

“Sir,” a voice said, directed at Charlie. Charlie did not reply.

“Sir,” the voice said again. The orb of a flashlight shined against Charlie’s closed eyes. A hand shook his shoulder. Charlie’s eyes shot open. He squinted. The man was a sergeant tasked with waking up officers before a combat mission. Charlie sat upright and apologized for having overslept. The orderly told Charlie the time—4:30
A.M.
He reminded Charlie that breakfast was at five and the briefing at six. The orderly roused Pinky from his slumber.

Charlie swung his feet onto the cold concrete floor. The fire in the building’s kerosene stove had died during the night. The bitter cold of the English winter made Charlie shiver. Snapping open the footlocker at the bottom of his cot, he removed his toiletries and the uniform he had neatly folded the night before. He set his green boxer shorts on his bed and his blue “bunny suit,” a pair of long johns with wires snaking through its quilted pads. An electric plug dangled from the suit that a crewman would click into an outlet on the bomber. Alongside his suit, Charlie tossed his olive slacks and shirt. He set his belt and tie on the pile and slid his polished oxford shoes from under his bed. He left his heavy flying pants and boots under his bunk to pick up later.