Once a Warrior (7 page)

Norm Sandrich, the crew’s navigator, made a scoffing sound. “This from a guy who can’t wait to get home so he can have some of his mama’s greens?”

“At least greens don’t have seeds,” the Arkansan drawled.

John cleaned his plate when it came, knowing he probably wouldn’t eat again until tonight. Unlike some of his crew, who carried C-rations to warm on the heat vents and eat on the way back from a mission, he couldn’t stomach food until he was safely on the ground again. Sitting back, he lit a cigarette and had a second cup of coffee while the others finished.

After breakfast, the four officers walked to the briefing room. They were early, but the two-by-sixes that had been laid across building blocks were almost full. A stage with a curtained wall behind it rose in front of the makeshift seats.

From the doorway, John spotted the six enlisted members of his crew. Bob said he’d go save four places in front of them, Pat and Norm went to get their pre-flight materials, and John picked up a mission briefing card. On the way to his seat, he stopped to confer with the Ops officer.

“You’ll fly deputy lead, in the number two position,” the officer told him.

“Roger.”  John accepted the assignment without question or complaint. If the mission lead dropped out of the formation for any reason, his crew’s job would be to assume the lead and complete the mission.

Given the early hour, the six enlistees greeted him with more enthusiasm than he’d expected. He attributed it to the fact that all of them were younger than he. At age twenty-two, he was older than everyone in his crew.

“Have you checked out the ship yet?”  As flight engineer and top turret gunner, Dirk Ellington was worried about their plane, which had sustained some flak damage on their trip to Bucharest the day before yesterday and had been sent to the hangar for repair.

“I walked over and talked to the ground crew after lunch yesterday,” John told him. “They promised to work all night if necessary to finish patching it up.”

Dirk nodded, then turned his attention to the papers he’d picked up at the door.

John grinned at his radio operator. “Got your Purple Heart on, Bill?”

Crewman Bill Burnside had been burned in the groin area by a short in his electrical suit during a raid over Nis, Yugoslavia, and John never failed to kid him about the decoration he’d received while recuperating from his injury.

“Right here.”  Bill opened his jacket and flashed his brag rag.

Pat came over, carrying a packet of evasion materials that the crew would use if they were shot down. In addition, Dirk had a box of hard candies and Bill a first-aid kit. After each mission Pat had to turn in his kit, but the crew usually ate up the candy on the way back to the base, and Bill always kept the medical supplies.

“Ten-HUT!” 

Everyone stood at attention when the group commander and the briefing officers mounted the stage. After they resumed their seats, a junior officer opened the curtain to reveal a wall-map on which the flight track from base to target and back to base was plotted. Two days ago there’d been groans and grimaces all around when the aircrews saw that the target was Bucharest. But today, when the map showed the same target, silence settled over them like a shroud.

“That’s right,” the group commander declared, “we’re going back to Bucharest.”  He stuck the tip of the pointer he carried at the target. “As you all know, the master plan calls for stepped-up activity against the Germans’ Romanian oil refineries as well as their oil transportation capabilities. We’re an essential part of that plan. So we’re going to hit these railyards again and, this time, we’re going to wipe ’em out for good.”

John noticed that he wasn’t alone in rolling his eyes. The commander seemed to have conveniently forgotten that their previous mission to Bucharest had been a toss-up as to which would be wiped out first—the bombardment group or the marshalling yards. Even worse, they’d lost two planes and their entire crews to antiaircraft fire.

The flak officer came next. The munitions, weather, maintenance and taxi-control officers followed him. Finally, to the commander’s solemn countdown of “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . HACK!” the pilots all synchronized their watches.

After the briefing, each crew huddled together to decide if there was anything special that needed to be done before they headed to the equipment hut.

“Have we got enough ammo?” Technical Sergeant Larry Shaffer asked.            

“For all the good it’ll do us against the flak.”  The expression on the face of the right waist gunner, Jerry Watson, was a grim reminder of the gauntlet of enemy gunfire they’d barely survived two days before.

The crew split up then, some of them going to finish last-minute chores and others making a beeline for the rooms behind the stage where chaplains of all faiths were waiting to tend to their spiritual needs.

After receiving Holy Communion and the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church, as he always did before going on a mission, John made the short walk over to operations to chat with the duty officer. He left encouraged by the news that his crew would probably be on an every-other-day schedule for the next couple of months. It was a killer rotation, no doubt about it. But the sooner he got this tour over with, he reminded himself, the sooner he’d be reunited with Kitty.

In the equipment hut, he put on his electrically-heated flying suit and fleece-lined boots, then slipped a life preserver—jokingly called a Mae West—over his shoulders and checked both CO² cylinders to make sure they worked. Rumor had it that some of the guys had been using the cartridges to cool their beer and returning them empty. His were full. A parachute harness with tight leg straps and two chest straps went over the Mae West; white silk gloves would later go under his heavy leather mittens to ward off frostbite at high altitudes.

His sandwich-board-shaped flak suit, which he regarded as almost useless because it left his arms and legs unprotected, would rest behind his seat during the mission.

“Load ’er up!”  Jerry had commandeered a truck and a driver to carry the crew, their equipment and the machine guns out to the plane.

Over his personalized leather helmet, John put on his flak helmet. It contained earphones and snaps for his oxygen mask, which had to be tightened constantly. He didn’t like the helmets with built-in microphones because the water condensing from his breath froze the instruments at high altitudes. Instead, he used a throat mike—two hard rubber pill-shaped devices that fit against his larynx by a strap around his neck.

Wearing the umbilical cords that would connect him to his crew and his aircraft, much the way his unborn child was connected to his wife’s body, he climbed into the truck with the other men.

The priest stood on the shoulder of the taxi strip. As each truck passed, he made the sign of the cross and said, “Take care of yourselves, boys. And God go with you.”

John spotted three ground-crew members standing by his plane when the truck stopped at the circular hardstand. While the other men piled out to perform their own individual pre-flight chores, he went through a sequence of instrument and control checks with the crew chief. That done, he walked around the plane with the mechanic he’d talked to the day before. First, they examined the steel patches that had been soldered over the holes sustained during their last mission to Bucharest. Then they checked to be sure the main fuel tanks and the auxiliary tanks were full, and that ten 500-pound bombs hung in the bay.

“Looks good,” John told him.

“Give Hans hell for me, sir.”

The flight crew climbed into the plane, where they spent the final few minutes before engine starting time getting into their takeoff positions.

“Anybody need their sinuses unplugged?”  Bill opened the first-aid kid and held up a bottle of nose drops. Hearing no takers, he treated himself to a snort before putting the bottle back.

“Everybody wearing their dog tags?” Bob asked as he slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to John’s.

“The rosary my mother gave me, too.”  Tommy Murphy reached down the front of his flight suit and pulled it out. He wore it around his neck on every mission, believing it brought him luck.

Ever the clown, Ed Harrigan grabbed the blue beads from behind and pretended to twist them around Tommy’s neck, saying in a bad German accent, “Start praying,
Ami
.”

Tommy crossed his eyes and made a gagging sound. Everyone laughed, releasing some of the pre-flight tension. Then the assembly officer gave the signal to start the engines.

John checked his watch as Bob reached for the starter engines. The base exploded with sound as thirty-six olive drab B-24 Liberators roared into life and the noise echoed off the mountain ridge. From the tower, a white signal light arced upward, with two stars falling from it.

It was time to go.

The ground crew gave them thumbs-up, the brakes were released, and the “Kansas City Kitty” moved off its hardstand to join the other planes in a single-file counterclockwise path around the perimeter taxi strip.

Fifteen minutes after the squadron’s engines started, the lead plane lifted off the single metal strip. John waited thirty seconds so he wouldn’t get caught in its prop wash before following. The knot of tension in his stomach tightened as the plane surged forward and the crew checked off.

“Gear up.”

“Wing flaps up.”

“Climb configuration.”

John tasted rubber, cold and bitter, through his oxygen mask as they lifted off. He’d seen so many aborted takeoffs, with at least two resulting in aircraft and bombs exploding at the end of the runway, that he couldn’t relax until they’d passed the first danger point in the mission. When they were finally airborne, he sighed with relief.

“Bombs activated,” Pat notified the pilots after they’d begun their hour-long assembly into box formation.

John’s stomach tightened on hearing the statement. He couldn’t count the number of hours he’d spent in the States practicing precision bombing until he could hit a “pickle barrel” from twenty-five thousand feet. But where he’d grown up believing that war involved only military men and military targets, he sometimes found himself bombing industrial towns that were largely populated with working people much like the members of his own family. So whenever the bombs dropped away and his aircraft leaped forward, free of its burden, he had ambivalent feelings. While he was glad to have a more maneuverable plane to fly, he felt guilty at the thought that he’d probably just killed a lot of innocent women and children.

On the lighter side, the sky was clear in all directions. People on the ground looked up. Some had their hands shading their eyes against the rising sun as they watched the growing air armada assemble. Others waved to them for luck.

John wished he could wave back. A war-weary Italy had surrendered last September, allowing the Allies to set up their air bases in the south, but the Germans were still fighting in the north. Bridges had been blown, villages destroyed and railroad ties demolished in an attempt to slow the Allied advance. It was that devastation, coupled with the abject poverty of the Italian people, which helped to remind him that he was on the right side of this cursed conflict.

“Oxygen check,” Bob called fifteen minutes into the flight.

“Pilot OK,” John replied as he relinquished the controls.       

Disembodied voices crackled over the intercom—tail gunner OK, nose OK, right waist OK, left waist OK, radio OK, top turret OK, bombardier OK, navigator OK.

The squadron flew in tight formation over the Adriatic Sea and into Yugoslavian airspace. It was the best protection they had because it maximized their firepower against the emplaced German gunners on the ground. But with the good came the bad. When a plane in close formation was hit by flak, there was a chance of it taking another one down with it. To minimize the risk, they usually relaxed the formation over target and then reformed for the trip home.

“How are we doing?” Bob asked.

John checked his watch against the clock on the instrument panel. “Exactly on time.”

The outside air temperature showed minus forty-eight degrees Centigrade, warmer than the minus sixty degrees that they’d recorded last week over Knin. The only clouds in the sky were the white contrails streaming from every wing tip.

“Oxygen check,” John called when it was his turn to resume control of the plane.

“Co-pilot OK,” Bob confirmed.

A few miles ahead, John spotted several cushiony puffs of flak below the formation. He didn’t worry about the flak he could see, though. It was the flak he couldn’t see that was the killer.

“
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra
,” Pat warbled.

“Bing Crosby, you’re not,” Norm cracked.

“
Too-ra-loo-ra-li
. . . ”

“Hush,
I’m
going to cry.”

Because time passed so slowly over enemy territory, some of the guys sang or told jokes or talked about the wives and sweethearts they’d left back home.

John just tried to think about the mission. When that didn’t work, he talked to the Man Upstairs. He prayed that he would do the right thing in an emergency. That he wouldn’t let his crew down. And, if worse came to worse, that he would meet death like a man.

So far, with the exception of a few bad flak attacks, his prayers had been answered.

“Got any names picked out for the baby?” Bob asked him now.

“John, Jr., if it’s a boy.”

“And if it’s a girl?”

“We can’t decide between Mary and Margaret.”

“How about Mary Margaret?”

“Mary Margaret.”  John mulled that over for a moment, then smiled. “I like it.”

As they crossed the Romanian border, thick puffs of black smoke filled the sky, blotting out the sun. From dead reckoning, John placed the antiaircraft guns about a hundred miles from target. The shells exploded well to the right of the formation. But like ants at a picnic, he knew, there were plenty more where those had come from.