When Heroes Flew

by H W Buzz Bernard

  If he were superstitious, he thought, he might have to wonder about carrying a woman into combat. But he decided not to accede to what he considered an old wives’ tale.

  “You’re doing great, Viv,” he said, deciding to give her a little unsolicited approbation.

  “We should be almost to Corfu,” she responded.

  George joined them on the interphone. “It’s coming up. We should start our climb to ten thousand in a few minutes.”

  As if on cue, the southern tip of the Greek island, held by Germans, hove into view. Ahead of the Circus, the Liberandos began their climb. Suddenly, without warning, one of the Liberando planes went into a series of wild gyrations. First dipping nose down, then up, then back down, as if strapped to a roller coaster. Nearby aircraft scattered away from it.

  “Holy crap,” Al called. “Can anybody see who that is?”

  Kenny responded from the bombardier’s position in the nose. “Looks like Wingo-Wango.”

  “Jesus,” Al said, “I think that’s Lieutenant Flavelle’s plane. Remember, the guy who took us on the successful raid to Messina a few months ago?”

  “Damn,” Kenny responded, “he’s in big trouble.”

  The Liberator continued to wallow out of control, up and down, until it virtually stood on its tail. Then it rolled abruptly onto its back and plunged toward the Mediterranean in a vertical dive.

  “Oh, God, no,” Al yelled.

  “No ’chutes,” Kenny said.

  Wingo-Wango hit the sea violently. A towering geyser of water shot into the air. The Liberator disappeared almost instantly into an azure grave.

  The episode had taken no more than thirty seconds.

  A second Liberator, Wingo-Wango’s wingman, rolled out of formation and went after the doomed B-24.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Al said.

  “Maybe he thinks there’ll be survivors,” Kenny answered. “Probably gonna drop some life rafts.”

  “Nobody survived that crash,” Al snapped. “Doesn’t matter anyhow. You don’t ever break a combat formation. Shit!” As much as it hurt to see a pilot he knew, one he’d flown a special mission with, go down, Al knew only Tidal Wave mattered now.

  He also knew Wingo-Wango’s wannabe rescuer would never catch up with the main force of B-24s. With a full load of bombs and still heavy with fuel, it would have neither the power nor the speed to climb back into formation. Scratch two more Liberators from the attack force.

  Al called the tail gun position. “Rhett, you still got the Pyramiders in sight behind us?”

  “Negative, sir. Haven’t seen them for the last ten minutes.”

  Al slammed his hand against the control wheel. “Damnit,” he shouted. Still five hundred miles from the target and the mission seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Not only had fifteen aircraft aborted or crashed already, the two lead groups had outdistanced the three trailing sections by what had to be at least four or five minutes. Without radio contact, no one knew how far behind the Pyramiders, Eight Balls, and Sky Scorpions had really fallen.

  Maybe, Al thought, Colonel Compton would realize the formation had become dangerously separated and slow his pace as they turned northeast from Corfu and barreled toward the coast of Albania. Maybe.

  As the Liberators climbed, Al stared down at the small island, its hilly topography a faded green and patchy brown in the summer heat. His stomach constricted into a taut ball. The territory belonged to the Germans. How could they not know the Americans were headed toward Ploesti? He had to assume even the element of surprise had now been lost.

  He considered voicing his concern to the crew, but decided against it. What difference would it make in the end? They would carry out the attack regardless.

  Kalamaki, Greece

  August 1, 1943

  A Kübelwagen ground to a halt in front of the alert hangar. Oberstleutnant Rödel, clad in a short-sleeved Luftwaffe shirt and khaki shorts, jumped out and strode to where Egon and his pilots sat in collapsible chairs around a folding table. Odors of machine oil, aviation fuel, and stale cigarettes permeated the stifling air of the open structure. Bare-chested in the blistering midday heat, the aviators sprang to attention as their commander approached.

  “As you were, gentlemen,” Rödel said. He spread open a map on the table. “Spotters in Corfu report a large force of American bombers, B-24s, passed over the island about fifteen minutes ago. That means they’re well out of our range already. They’re also too far east to be going after a target in Italy or Austria.”

  “So Ploesti is certainly in play then,” Egon said, more of a declaration than a question.

  “Absolut. Especially since reports had them turning northeast, toward Albania and Yugoslavia, after they reached the northern end of the island. If you extrapolate that course, it carries them into Bulgaria or Romania.”

  “So it could still be Sofia, or maybe even Bucharest.”

  Rödel shrugged. “Maybe. But as you pointed out earlier, probably not with such a large force.”

  “Did we get a better fix on the numbers?”

  “Spotters estimate one hundred sixty-five Liberators in all. But here’s the strange thing. They passed over Corfu in two separate sections. About sixty in the first bunch. A little over one hundred in the second group five minutes later.”

  “Two different targets then?”

  Rödel pinched his lips together, brushed a sheen of sweat from his brow. “Could be. Intel hasn’t figured it out yet. It’s puzzling. At any rate, Ploesti is on high alert now. They’ll be ready for an attack if that’s the destination.”

  “No escorts?”

  “No US fighters can match the range of the Liberators. They’re on their own.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Wait.”

  A few of the men groaned in protest. They wanted to fight.

  “Whatever the target—Ploesti, Bucharest, Sofia—it makes no difference to us. The Americans have to come back the same way they went in. I’d guess that would be in about five or six hours. But we’ll be better able to pinpoint their egress time after the attack is underway. Once we’ve got that, we’ll be lying in wait.”

  Egon nodded. “No one escapes,” he said to his pilots. Smiles and nods came in response.

  “If the target is Ploesti,” Rödel continued, “the B-24s, many of those that survive—and there won’t be a lot—will be badly wounded when they return. Shot up, engines out, low on ammo, tired and injured crews, probably not in defensive formations. I want Gruppe IV to finish them off. Not a single Liberator gets back to Benghazi. Verstehst du?” His final words came out as a firm command.

  A loud chorus of “Yes, sirs” followed.

  16

  Over Albania

  August 1, 1943

  Colonel Compton led the Liberando and Circus Liberators inland over Albania. Ahead of them loomed the Pindus Mountains along Albania’s border with Yugoslavia. As the bombers approached the mountains, Al spotted the first of the towering cumulus, bubbling white stacks of clouds reaching skyward, clouds that the weather guesser warned would be there.

  “Pindus Range?” Vivian asked.

  “Yes, but it’s not one long, continuous structure. It’s a bunch of shorter ranges.”

  “Ten thousand will clear everything?” As she spoke, she swiveled her head, checking the formation of bombers. She made only minor movements with the control wheel and seemed able to hold Oregon Grinder in position with minimal effort.

  “It’s certainly nothing like the Rockies,” Al said. “The tallest peaks are maybe eight or nine thousand feet, so ten or eleven thousand will keep us out of danger. We’ll maintain a loose formation, so we’ll be able to steer around the biggest clouds without running into each other.”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay. Take the controls for a while. I’m gonna go back and check on the gunners. Keep Hell’s Wench on your left wing and we’ll be fine.”

  “Roger that. I got the controls.”


  Al clambered out of his seat, removed his headset, and slipped on his leather flight jacket. The temperature in Oregon Grinder had dropped from the upper sixties to low forties since they had climbed away from the warm Mediterranean. At least it’s forty above, not forty below, he reminded himself. Some of the missions he’d flown out of England to the continent at high altitude had been in that frigid forty below range. In that kind of iciness, not even the crews’ electrically heated “bunny suits” could ward off the bone chilling frigidness.

  Immediately behind the cockpit, he stopped to talk with Sergeant McGregor, usually the radio operator. He now occupied the flight engineer/top turret gunner’s spot, the position he’d volunteered to take over after Master Sergeant Gallagher had elected not to fly the mission. While Al had offered all the men that option, only Gallagher had chosen it. It would not reflect negatively on Gallagher’s record since he’d been given the choice by his commanding officer, but Al knew if his crew survived, Gallagher would be forever ostracized by them.

  Al engaged in a shouted conversation with McGregor since the bellow of the bomber’s engines prevented talk at normal levels. He thanked the sergeant profusely for stepping forward to fill Gallagher’s vacancy, then pointed at some gauges on a panel in the position he now occupied.

  “Keep an eye on these,” he yelled. “Normally the flight engineer monitors them.” He leaned closer to them to get a good look at the positions of the needles on the dials. “They all look fine now. If you see any big movements in the needles, give me a holler on the interphone and I’ll come take a look.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  Al slapped him on the back. “Thanks again, Stretch.”

  He stepped down onto the catwalk that traversed the bomb bay. He couldn’t go forward—too narrow a passage—to the nose of Oregon Grinder where the navigator and bombardier resided in cramped quarters. Instead, he edged along the catwalk, turning his body sideways and rubbing shoulders with bombs that carried almost two tons of destruction destined for Ploesti.

  Behind the bomb racks, a myriad of cables, pipes, and wires—the arteries and veins of the aircraft—clung to the sides of the bomber. Just above the racks the wings met and were bolted together. The inboard section of each wing bore the fuel cells that fed the engines mounted on that respective wing.

  The fact the fuel cells and bombs sat in such close proximity near the center of the plane made it the most vulnerable spot of a B-24. Luftwaffe fighter pilots knew this, of course, and preferred to attack Liberators from above, aiming their nose cannons and machine guns at the top-center of the bomber. A direct hit could shear off a wing and send the plane into a fire-wrapped death-dive.

  Al grasped the craft’s steel beams and cross members for support as he continued to wriggle his way aft along the catwalk. Even cruelly overloaded, Oregon Grinder jiggled and bounced in the updrafts generated by the midday sunshine and increasingly rugged topography below. Faint odors of fuel and hydraulic fluid floated through the air.

  At the end of the catwalk, he clambered up two steps to the waist gunners’ positions, each marked by a large open window and a manually operated fifty-caliber machine gun, one on the right side of the Liberator, the other on the left. A biting wind whipped through the windows into the interior of the plane.

  Sergeants Richard Hamilton, “Chippy,” and Ned Reeser arose from the ammo boxes on which they’d been sitting and greeted him with big smiles. Tech Sergeant Blaine Witkowski, “Stumpy,” the bottom turret gunner, stood up from where he’d been sitting next to the ball turret well, waiting for the action to begin before squeezing into the turret and being lowered into position on the underbelly of the bomber.

  They carried on a brief but loud conversation. Before Al departed, he reminded Chippy and Ned to try to avoid blowing off Oregon’s Grinder’s tail section when the shooting began. The waist gunners’ firing breadth covered a huge swath, and with Liberators’ twin vertical stabilizers extending out on either side of the tail, they often ended up taking hits from “friendly” fire—their own waist gunners.

  Al’s admonition drew a good laugh. He continued his trip toward the bomber’s rear, dropping into a crouch as he neared the tail gunner’s place of business. The plane’s motions became magnified in the tail, and the fuselage oscillated constantly from side to side, up and down.

  “Hey, Rhett,” Al yelled, “any sign of the Pyramiders?”

  Staff Sergeant Cummings twisted in his tight quarters to look behind him. “Oh, Pops, good to see you. No, negative. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since before Corfu.”

  Al shook his head in disappointment. He hadn’t imagined the force becoming separated, and doubted the planners had either.

  He and Cummings carried out a brief exchange of small talk, then Al clapped him on the shoulder and returned to the cockpit.

  Vivian had done a yeoman job keeping Oregon Grinder tucked in near Hell’s Wench.

  “Looks like you’re a pro at flying in formation,” he said after seating himself.

  “First time.” She flashed a confident grin. “At least I didn’t ram him.” She inclined her head toward Hell’s Wench.

  Al fell silent, thinking about the jeopardy the split in the bomber flights had put the raid in. He listened to the throaty roar of Oregon Grinder’s engines, the sound as reassuring and familiar as that of a finely tuned barbershop quartet. He scanned the RPM and manifold pressure gauges. Everything looked good. He pointed at the gauges in front of the copilot’s position—the cylinder head temperatures, and the oil and fuel pressures and temperatures.

  Vivian nodded, moved her gaze over them, and gave a thumbs-up.

  At least Oregon Grinder would be in top form as she went into battle.

  After several moments, Vivian leaned close to Al and raised her voice to overcome the engine noise. “What’s up? You seem preoccupied.”

  He considered not relaying his fears to her, but decided against it. As his copilot on a combat mission, she had every right to know and understand the situation. “The guys behind us, the Pyramiders, the Eight Balls, the Sky Scorpions, have dropped way off the pace. Our tail gunner hasn’t seen them since before Corfu. The attack was designed for all the bomb groups to hit their targets almost simultaneously. If we don’t, the element of surprise is lost.”

  “Why doesn’t the lead group slow down, let the others catch up?”

  “I don’t know if Colonel Compton is even aware that more than half his force has fallen behind. Without radio contact, he can’t check on them, and they can’t inform him. It’s messed up.”

  “So what happens?”

  “Nothing good. Look, I’m sorry I got you into this. It’s going to get rough.” He thought of the violence that loomed in their immediate future, like a summer storm lurking unseen just beyond the horizon.

  Vivian looked directly at him, a latent fierceness in her eyes. “I didn’t think combat was going to be anything like wing walking. So tell me what to expect. Specifically. No mollycoddling.”

  They worked together to bank the plane in concert with Hell’s Wench around a stack of bubbly clouds that appeared to be spitting out rain from their bases. Ahead of them, the Liberandos had done the same. Now they began to climb again, gaining a bit more altitude in preparation for topping a wall of clouds that sat atop a rocky ridge in the middle distance.

  The maneuver completed, Al responded to Vivian’s request. “We’ll attack regardless of whether the groups are together. We’ll go in first, us and the Liberandos, but we’ll have a much smaller force than planned. So the antiaircraft crews and fighters defending Ploesti will be able to concentrate their fire on just us, not the entire force. That means, quite frankly, our odds of getting nailed go way up.”

  Vivian swallowed hard and nodded.

  “Our only hope is that we’ve still got the element of surprise with us, that the Germans don’t know we’re coming. Maybe by staying low, beneath their radar beams, and maintaining radio silen
ce we’ve been able to go undetected. But between you and me, Viv, I doubt it.”

  She nodded again but didn’t say anything. Perhaps she’d heard more than she wanted.

  He drew a deep breath and went on. “But it won’t be us that gets the worst of it. Assuming we do surprise the Krauts, the second part of our force won’t. They’re likely to get cut to pieces because every bit of firepower the enemy has will be primed for them. It could turn into a turkey shoot for the Germans.” He felt a wave of nausea slide through his gut as he spoke the words. He went back to the business of flying Oregon Grinder.

  A short time later, George called over the interphone. “We’re entering extreme northern Bulgaria now, Pops.”

  “Thanks, Rabbi. Okay, everyone, heads-up. The Bulgarians have some old Czech fighters and a handful of Messerschmitts, so they might get curious. But I doubt they’ll challenge us unless they think we’re going for Sofia.”

  Below, the terrain began to drop away and Colonel Compton led the Liberators in a snaking descent down the eastern slopes of the mountains toward the Danube River, the boundary of Romania.

  “Why are we doing the serpentine?” Vivian asked.

  Al had wondered, too, but thought he knew.

  “Maybe Colonel Compton’s realized he’s lost his trailing groups. By zig-zagging a bit, I think he’s trying to slow our advance, give Killer Kane and the others a chance to catch up, but it burns more fuel, so he’s not gonna do it for long.”

  “You think it’ll help?”

  “Doubt it. I think the rest of the force is just too far behind. We haven’t seen them for a couple of hours now.” He considered calling his tail gunner again and asking if he’d spotted the Pyramiders. But he knew if Rhett had, he would have broadcast the news immediately.

  “Could we orbit someplace and wait for them?” Vivian asked, obviously trying to discover a solution for what had become a dagger in the heart of the attack plan.

  “No. We’re about to enter enemy territory, and if we went into a holding pattern now, that would increase our exposure way too much, not to mention waste fuel we’ll need to get outta here. And again, we have no idea how far the other groups are behind. We gotta keep moving.”