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

by Adam Makos

  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.

  CHARLIE AND MARJORIE 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.”

  13

  THE LIVES OF NINE

  TWO MONTHS LATER, DECEMBER 20, 1943, CENTRAL ENGLAND

  IN 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 offi
cers 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.

  Pinky greeted Charlie with a whisper. Charlie nervously faked a smile. After getting a mission under his belt, Charlie was no longer apprehensive of combat. But this time he knew he would be flying as the aircraft’s commander. He was worried, not of dying, but of messing up and taking nine other men’s lives with him. Another thought crept into his mind and propelled him forward. No man in the Army Air Forces was forced to fly in combat. He had volunteered for this. With that came extra pay and a sense of something intangible: pride. When Charlie reported to the 8th, he had landed himself in a unit that would lose more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps.

  Charlie grabbed a towel, his toiletries, and shuffled off to the showers in a building behind the hut. December 20 was a Monday. It was time to get to work.

  THE AIR WAS stinging cold as Charlie and other airmen hurried through the darkness toward the mess hall, their hands tucked into pockets of their leather jackets. Some carried flashlights because the base was still blacked out. The flashlights’ bobbing beams revealed curved Nissen huts, the prefabricated dwellings that looked like half-buried cans and served as barracks, offices, and storage containers. The men passed the base flagpole and message board, which read: “Welcome to Kimbolton, home of the 379th Bombardment Group.” Other men rode past Charlie on bicycles, dodging the neat white wooden blocks that lined the gravel streets like reflectors. A tiny light sat between the handlebars of each bike. In the darkness the lights sparkled as they converged from all directions on the long mess hall with the arched roof.

  The tin ceiling above the rafters of the mess hall reflected the clatter of mess trays and silverware. Cooks sparingly ladled eggs and ham onto the trays of the bomber crewmen, knowing that most men had little appetite. The meal was primarily a formality. Most of the pilots and crews congregated around barrels of coffee and filled their mugs and thermoses.

  Charlie sat with his officers, Pinky, Doc, and Andy. Andy looked meeker and more analytical than usual, and Doc tried to look cool although his eyes darted to and fro. Doc and Andy barely touched their plates. Instead they watched Charlie pick at his food and drink cup after cup of coffee. Pinky stuffed his cheeks with ham and eggs, too inexperienced to have butterflies. The breakfast was designed to avoid serving foods with fiber. Anything that could produce gas in a man could give him the bends at altitude. They made small talk about the base’s holiday dance scheduled for that night, one that promised “Coke, beer, and women.”

  When Charlie stood, his men stood with him. He led them to the briefing hut. They found the room crowded with other officers and grabbed folding metal chairs near the front. Above a small stage were two large wooden doors that hid a vast map of Europe. Lights dangled from the ceiling, upside down cones that ran from the room’s front to back. “The room has a man smell,” a navigator would write, “…leather from our jackets, tobacco, sweat, a little fear, which has its own distinctive sharpness.”1

  Around Charlie and his crew, other pilots wore their hats cocked farther than usual. The veterans’ jackets had dark, broken-in folds and whiskey stains. They tossed their white scarves as they joked and planned which pub they were going to hit after the mission. They were pros at hiding shakiness. Charlie saw colorful painted art on the backs of their jackets that glorified their planes’ names: Nine Yanks and a Rebel, Anita Marie, Sons of Satan, and others. Small painted bombs in neat rows spanned the back of nearly every jacket, one bomb for every mission its wearer had flown. Every man in that room was trying to reach mission twenty-five and the end of his tour. Of the 379th’s original thirty-six crews, not one had completed its tour with all ten men unharmed.

  A pilot tapped the back of Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie turned and saw the jug ears and toothy smile of his flight leader, Second Lieutenant Walter Reichold, who took a seat behind him. Walt was the most popular pilot in the 379th due to his snappy New England charm. Charlie was glad he’d wound up in the 527th Bomb Squadron, the same as Walt. Walt was from Winsted, Connecticut, and in college had been the president of his fraternity, a swimmer, diver, skier, and actor, all while studying Aeronautical Engineering, something he looked forward to resuming after the war. Walt’s jacket was bare, like Charlie’s, although Walt had flown twenty-two missions. Walt was superstitious. He was unwilling to jinx his tour by painting his jacket or even talking about his tour’s end, which Charlie and everyone knew was just three missions from being complete.

  “How’d you sleep?” Walt asked Charlie.

  “Logged a few hours,” Charlie said.

  Walt was surprised Charlie had slept at all. Sleeping was hardest at the start of a pilot’s tour and at the end. Walt offered Charlie his flask but Charlie refused. Coming from moonshine country, he had seen how alcohol compounded people’s woes. Walt took a belt for himself and another that he said was “for Charlie.” Then he passed the flask to his officers.

  The hubbub ended as Colonel Maurice “Mighty Mo” Preston, the 379th Group commander, entered the rear of the room. A captain shouted, “Ten hut.” The men sprang to their feet. Preston strode through the center aisle, already dressed head to toe in his leather flying gear, his jaw lowered like a linebacker’s. Charlie felt the air move as Preston passed by him.

  Preston took his place before the mission board with an actor’s precision. He knew that in a way he was doing exactly that—acting. His job was to be larger than life to inspire the boys. It helped that he had a square jaw, thick blond hair, and that, as one officer put it, “his shoulders were square and wide as the front end of a jeep.”2

  Preston ordered the men to be at ease and seated. With a tight grin, he surveyed the room. Inspiration beamed from his eyes. Preston loved the war because he was good at it.* He was more than a hard-nosed commander. He was innovative. Under his leadership, the 379th had become the first group to fly in smaller, more maneuverable twelve-plane formations and the first to do multiple runs over a target if bad weather covered the aiming point. After every mission, Preston passed out feedback forms to his pilots. He welcomed any ideas they had to improve tactics or remedy problems. With his encouragement his men even went so far as to take apart their bombsights to tweak the factory-programmed calibrations and improve the sights’ accuracy. Preston encouraged his men to have girlfriends and to live with vigor, hoping they would fly and fight that way, too. Before the war’s end, the 379th would prove him right.

  Preston nodded to his operations officer. The officer fanned open the doors and revealed the map. The mission’s course was marked with red yarn that led east across the North Sea, straight to the German city of Bremen. From there, the yarn shot ninety degrees upward into the sea before turning west and straight back to England. The men were silent. They would only groan if the target was new or deep in Germany. They knew Bremen too well, having gone there three times in the past eight days.

  A grin crept across Preston’s face. “It’s nice to see no one objects to where we’re going,” he said. The men chuckled. When Preston looked at Charlie, Charlie squirmed. He wondered if Preston could sense his anxiety. The veter
ans around him turned silent and serious.

  “The target for today,” Preston said, “is the FW-190 plant on the city’s outskirts.” Preston explained that nearly all of the 8th Air Force’s bomb groups were on the mission roster, 475 B-17s and B-24s. At the time, there were twenty-six bomb groups operational in England and twenty-three of them were going to Bremen. Friendly fighter cover had been pledged for both the road to the Reich and home. Preston warned the men that in addition to P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts, they might see the new P-51 Mustangs and to not shoot them down, even if they looked like Messerschmitts.

  Preston stepped aside as a young intelligence officer with spectacles jumped to his feet to explain the mission’s nuts and bolts. He warned them to expect a greeting from German fighters, “maybe five hundred bandits or more.” He was careful to call them “bandits.” No one who had been in combat called the enemy “Krauts” or “Jerries,” out of an odd, fearful respect.

  The intelligence officer reviewed the escape and evasion plan and told the men that if they were shot down over Germany to move toward the coast. “Try to commandeer a fishing boat there, and sail for home.” The veterans laughed at the notion of rowing three hundred miles across the turbulent North Sea. Preston did not stop their laughter—he, too, fought a smirk. He reminded the men that there would be no sailing to Sweden either. “If you have power to get to Sweden, you have power to try to get to England,” he told the men.