We used to play poker and when they played poker, the guys would sit with their cards up close. We would steal—‘take home’, let’s put it that way—the Very pistol cartridges; we didn’t sell them to anybody. It goes in a Very pistol—it’s a flare gun, the flares would either be red-red, red-green, whatever colors, and we’d snap off the shotgun shell part and I’d roll it up in newspaper and we’d feed the fire. When they’re playing poker, we’d just drop it in and suddenly the entire barracks room would turn full of red smoke, green smoke. When it cleared, [they would still be sitting there] with their hands on the cards and the money, it was hilarious. One hand was always on the cards, the other was always on the money, because we were all conditioned to this gag. Gags, there were quite a few. When we’d go to the latrine at night, we’d take a Very pistol out, load it and fire it. The MPs would come and they’d say, ‘Who did that?’ We’d say, ‘The guys over there’ and they would roust those guys and give them hell.
The ground-pounders, the ground personnel, disliked us immensely. They had a perpetual hate because we made more money than they did. I was a staff sergeant and I made the equivalency in pay of a captain. Overseas pay, flight pay and we threw our money around like it didn’t matter for the simple reason that the next morning you might be eating sauerbraten someplace.
*
I became an extra gunner. My pilot did some silly things but he got away with them, they promoted him, he was a good flyer. The tail gunner went, I went, the engineer went, everybody off the crew went and he got other personnel to train him to be a lead pilot. I’m doing nothing now, I’m without a crew, walking around, having fun, I could do anything I want, but I couldn’t go home until I finished my tour. It’s driving me slightly crazy. The war was coming to an end and I wasn’t going to see it, but I really did love to fly.
An Aborted Mission
Let me tell you the story about the oranges. An aborted mission means they send you back, something happened, somebody changed their mind. We went to the briefing, then we went to breakfast and they came in and said the mission was aborted. That was very good, marvelous, and all hell broke loose in the mess hall. As we were very privileged we did get fresh eggs, I think, and good meat and all that nonsense, we got oranges. They started to throw the oranges around. I grew up during the Depression and I didn’t think that was funny. They had just gone bonkers. I kept picking up the oranges that weren’t spoiled and I had a gas mask kit that the first thing I did when we got to England was throw the gas mask away and put my underwear and socks in and use for an overnight bag. I stuffed it full of oranges. When you weren’t flying, there was nothing to do. The only duty that we had would be at night, to guard your airplane, they would trust us for that, but we had no KP and we didn’t pull guard duty other than on the plane. I went back and I got into my Class A uniform and I went to town. I changed trains at Ipswich and went to Norwich, which was a delight because I liked old things and castles, and to go around and see things. I figured I’d spend the day at Norwich, have dinner there, and then come back. I took the oranges and I got off the train and I’m there on a corner and I called the little kids over. The kids always wanted chewing gum and chocolate and cigarettes, and they wouldn’t take the cigarettes that we got for free, they wanted the good cigarettes. The English didn’t have oranges or any kind of citrus; we didn’t bring in anything in for the English. I’m nineteen or twenty, and I’m giving away oranges, and a woman comes out of a house with an umbrella and she starts to beat me with it! My mother always said you never ever hit a woman, you can restrain a woman, but you never hit her. I ran into a pub and I’m out of breath and guys there are laughing and I said, ‘What did I do wrong?’ An Englishman said to me, ‘She thought you were a dirty old man.’ I didn’t know what a ‘dirty old man’ was and when they explained it to me, I was furious and that time I came close to hitting a woman. I didn’t think it was funny that she would accuse me of something like that.
An Old Friend
Let me tell you about meeting an old friend. I had a buddy who was in the infantry and he got lucky. Just before going to France, they discovered he had flat feet. Just like the Army, [they all of a sudden] discover you only have one leg or something like that. They had him at a repo depot someplace in England.[22] I wrote to him, he wrote to me, I didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know where I was and I’m not supposed to tell him where I am because God forbid the Germans would find out, although the Germans knew exactly where we were every minute of the day. Every night before a mission the Germans would tell us where we were going [before we were even briefed], that was very nice, I enjoyed that immensely. We’d go into a room with MPs and a screen and they’d lock the door, just like in the movies, and then they’d pull it up and you’d find out what the mission is for the day—except I knew what the mission was for the day because the German with the best jazz program told me where we were going— [Imitates radio broadcaster] ‘The 445th, you will be our guests’, blah, blah, blah. The cook knew where we were going; the guys in the hallway knew where we were going.
Getting back to my friend, I wanted to find my friend. I went to London, to headquarters, which was a mistake. All I wanted was for them to tell me where my old buddy was. I got into headquarters and when I told them what I wanted, they threw me through the door, they literally kicked me out. They told me I was insane and that the Army doesn’t function that way. So using what knowledge I had, I had an officer un-censor my letter. I go to him and I said, ‘Sal, I’m at this base, I’m at this telephone number, you can reach me, that’s where my squadron is. Kindly tell me where you are.’ This officer was nice enough, he said, ‘You’re absolutely right, it’s stupid’, and he signed it and stamped it. It went V-Mail all the way to the States and all the way back again. He finally it, he phoned me and I got on a train because I had all the time in the world; by that time I think I was an extra gunner. I went to see him and he was in a repo depot which means all these poor guys who had gotten broken up, had to be rehabilitated and reassigned, things like that. I said, ‘Get on your Class A’s, let’s get out of here and have dinner.’ He said, ‘The food here is better than the food in town.’ It was hospital food but it was beautiful food. I saw some guys in black uniforms; I didn’t like the black. We were told if you got shot down, you didn’t surrender to anybody but a guy in a green uniform, never to a man in a black uniform, they were the SS and they were bad news. So we’re sitting at this table having coffee and I said, ‘Who are those people?’ and he said, ‘They’re ex-paratroopers that are broken up, and they’re here training everybody to get them in shape, and they wear these black gym suits.’ I said in a very loud voice, ‘You mean that stupid son-of-a-bitch over there is an ex-paratrooper, the one with the big nose? That god-awful looking piece of shit?’ My friend is now going crazy, he says, ‘He’s going to hear you!’ I said, ‘I want him to hear me!’ It was a kid I knew from grade school and we hugged each other and he came over and we all had coffee and laughed. He had jumped the day before D-Day, when they put guys on the ground.
Guard Duty
We’re in England and we’re in the war. I think I told you that you had to pull duty by taking care of the airplanes at night just before they took off, that was the only duty you had to do. One time I was called to do it and it was cold and wet and I was very tired and I had been carousing and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I knew that if you fell asleep you could be court-martialed. It wasn’t very nice to fall asleep because the Germans were doing very nasty things. They were dropping paratroopers down, espionage kind of guys, and they would drop fountain pens into our airplanes. They looked like fountain pens but they were altimeter bombs, so that when the bombers got up to a certain altitude this thing would explode and the plane would go down. It was a very good method. We had to make sure nobody got near the planes. I broke into an escape kit and I took out the stay-awake pill. When you were shot down you had certain things in this thing. You had morphine, which was neve
r there, and you had other stuff and you had this pill. I guess it’s what the kids use in college to stay awake but this was a super pill because this was supposed to make you feel like Superman. I did not want to be court-martialed so I took the pill, took some water and I felt great. I’d never taken drugs in my life but this was marvelous. They told me they weren’t going to come for the plane until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and wouldn’t you know it, at 2:00 in the morning they come over and they say, ‘You can leave now.’ I asked why and they said they had changed the mission to something else. I went back to my barracks and I put my head on the pillow. I closed my eyes and it was like when you snap a window [shade] up, it rolls up. I couldn’t keep my eyelids closed; my eyelids would not close. Around 4:00 that afternoon it was like somebody hit me with a baseball bat, I just collapsed. That was a great pill.
Sergeant Grayboy
Going back, we took off on a mission to Berlin. Berlin’s a nasty place to go, it had a bad reputation. We were the first wave over wherever the hell we were going, the target area. It’s a long, long flight and when you flew in those planes you got down on the ground and you always knew who flew that day, because they would be shouting, everybody had to shout. Nobody could hear, your hearing had gone. Those engines—you were eight hours, maybe nine hours, who knew how long you were in the plane. This guy runs up to me and says, ‘You were in the first wave, how many went down?’ I said, ‘We were lucky, they caught hell behind us.’ He cursed like a son-of-a-bitch: he had the book on us, he was running a pool. This was Sergeant Grayboy, my buddy, one of my favorite friends. Sergeant Grayboy would book on anything. There was another guy who I hated, a guy who came up after a mission and said, ‘Thank God you got back.’ He was an armorer. I never heard anybody say ‘thank God you came back’, I was really quite thrilled. I said, ‘That’s very nice of you.’ Now he was going to take out the guns out and do the dirty work in the plane. Then he said, ‘Because I left my coffee cup in your plane and I couldn’t get a cup of coffee.’
We went on a mission and they aborted the mission. It was a bad one to begin with because planes were running into one another. We took off in fog and you got up to six thousand fog, ten thousand fog, twelve thousand fog, you’re going up there and there’s nothing but fog. And then it wasn’t fog any more, it was contrails. We had to form on the flares, the flare color. That’s when I discovered all the fun things we did with flares. We didn’t see the planes hit, you just saw the big explosion, you saw the big red, you felt the vibration. So the pilot was pretty smart, he was a good pilot, he was just not a nice person. He decided that we’ll fly around, burn up gasoline and do whatever we have to do with the bombs, [and return home]. So we’re flying around in the North Sea all by ourselves and the navigator is getting upset and rightfully so because the fighters are going to pick up a single aircraft and you’re a dead goose. So he sees a bastard squadron—we all had different tail markings and you could tell from the tail markings that these guys were doing the same thing, they had the smarts to say let’s stay together. He tacks on and the navigator was still pretty bright. He said, ‘What if it’s a German weather ship?’ When B-24’s went down, they didn’t always break up completely and some of them were actually captured with just the landing gear broken. They would rebuild them, fly them up and try to infiltrate our squadrons, they would find out where we’re going, listen to the conversation. You’d just be stuck because if this was a German leading us around on a merry goose chase, we’re in deep trouble. He goes up front, writes down all the data on the guy’s tail, all that crap. I think they talked to one another with something or other. He said we’re going to pull the pins on the bombs. So we went into the bomb bays, you had to take the cotter pins out of the bombs. Then all hell broke loose, the place turned into a shooting gallery and we were hit and we dropped our bomb. We didn’t know who we hit, what poor stupid bastard on the ground was so upset that he decided to fire. If he didn’t fire at us, we wouldn’t have dropped the bomb. Our pilot was very upset because he wanted to be, and he did eventually become, a lead pilot. He wanted a promotion so badly. Anyway, we get back and all the other members of our squadron had gotten back much earlier. We come back, one engine’s out, all kinds of holes in the plane, the crew chief is mad as hell because he would rather that we’d gone down so that he wouldn’t have to repair the plane—it’s true, that’s the way the guy felt, that’s what he said, ‘Look what you did to my plane—how many hours I’m going to be working on this?!’ I wanted to kick his butt. Now you have to understand that I’m dead, and I go back to our barracks and everything is gone. The bedding is gone, my footlocker is gone, my shirts, pants, my stuff that’s hung up, everything gone. What’s going on? It seems that the practice was that when a crew went down, they immediately took the footlocker because they were going to send things home to the families and they would go through it to make sure there wasn’t anything in it that would upset a wife, girlie pictures, whatever some idiot might have in his footlocker. Everything was fine; I got everything back except my tunic. There were no tunics to be had on my base—this is old Catch-22 again—you can’t get off the base unless you were in a Class A uniform. You can’t get a Class A uniform because they don’t have any, right? If I could get off the base, I could buy one because the English had these Army-Navy shops and I could go in and for $30-$40 bucks I could get another jacket but I can’t get off the base. I was very upset.
Along comes a guy with my jacket on. I could tell my jacket because I could not sew, couldn’t do any of those girl things. I was actually the worst soldier in the world; I would take cotter pins and put the buttons on with cotter pins and hide it so no one would see it. I had a special pair of silver wings that I had bought, a little fancier than what the other guys had because I thought it was kind of cute. Also, the jacket had my name stenciled in the back with my serial number. I said, ‘That’s my jacket’, and he said, ‘But it fits me.’ It was an invitation to a fight; he wanted me to fight him for my jacket. I just looked at this guy, I put my hand in my jacket, pulled out my .45, pointed it right at him and I said to him in a very nice calm voice, ‘On the jacket is a marksmanship medal for the .45. I’m going to cock it, I’m going to take the safety off, I’m going to shoot you and I’m not going to get any blood on the jacket.’ I had it pointed just where the jacket ended. He took the jacket off immediately, threw it down, and away he went. I’ve been asked by many guys would I have shot him. I think I would have, I honestly think at that point, after the aggravation I had that day, that this clown is stealing something that belongs to me right in front of me and he wants me to punch him in the nose; I think I would have shot him. Somebody said, ‘Why didn’t you call an MP?’ I said, ‘I never called a cop in my life.’ When I was a kid, the cops used to hit us with billies, make us move, because we were playing stickball or we were disruptive or we were too noisy or this or that.
Now, Grayboy—I think I told you before about this guy—he was into everything, he was into black market, he had a beautiful leather jacket. I never got a leather jacket, I’m a deprived person. We had a deal. He wanted my camera which I wouldn’t sell him—oh, the camera story. When you were flying, when planes got hit, guys would bail out, they would want to know how many guys got bailed out but everybody had a different count so taking a photograph was rather important. Photography was very strong with me and I picked up this K-20 camera, like a Speed Graphic, and I took some beautiful pictures. When we came down from the mission I went to the photographic unit, I knocked on the door, wanted to see my pictures. They said it was classified. I said, ‘What are you talking about, I took the pictures, I want to see how they came out!’ He said, ‘Sergeant, if you don’t go away, we’re calling the MPs.’ I’m banging on the door, I want to see my pictures, I don’t see anything wrong with just looking at them, give me one little snapshot for a souvenir. Under the threat of calling the MPs, which I knew would be trouble, they gave me a batch of pictures and they sent me away, b
ut none of the mission I flew! Anyway, Grayboy and the camera; he wanted my camera, I wanted his jacket. We couldn’t make a deal so we made an announcement in the barracks that if Grayboy got killed, I got the jacket, and if I went down, he got the camera. One morning he went up to fly and he had on the jacket and I told him to take it off. He said, ‘It’s cold outside.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a god-damn, take the jacket off.’ I made him take the jacket off and wear a sweater because we had that deal!
Let me tell you the story about Grayboy and flying the last mission. Everybody wanted to go home, be a hero or whatever you want to call it. One night in bed, Grayboy slept in the bed next to me, and he was doing something I have never seen anybody do. He was putting out his cigarettes with his fingertips, and then he’d throw the cigarette down on the ground and light another one. He had plenty of cigarettes. He’s lighting cigarettes and putting them out with his fingers and I said to him, ‘Grayboy, you’ve got a problem; you want to talk about this?’ He said, ‘This is my last mission, this is it.’ I was a poor kid, he had money, he was into the black market, and he could get you anything you wanted. He wanted me to fly his last mission. We had different deals; I was an extra gunner, [with time on my hands]. You ask how could a guy do that? Well, it was very easy. When somebody was sick and you were flying their mission, your name is Grayboy, mine is Alagna, so they know on the roster that Sergeant Alagna is to fly in Tom Jones’ plane. Or you’d show up and you had your helmet on, you had your goggles on the top of your head, the pilot never saw you before; this is wild, dark, and wooly. All he wanted was a body at a machine gun or in a turret. When I come back, he gets the credit and I get the money, so yes, it was done. How many times it was done, I have no idea, but it was done.
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