by Noel Hynd
“You’re Glenn Taylor?” the man asked as Taylor approached.
“Yes, sir?”
The man stuck out a hand. “I’m Michael Forsythe,” the visitor said. “Please to meet you, patriot.”
Taylor accepted and they shook. The visitor announced that he worked for a civilian division of the newly formed United States Air Force. He flashed a piece of identification. But the word “Air” had already captured Taylor’s full attention.
“What can I do for you?” Taylor asked.
“Fly,” the man said.
“Sorry. Not following. I weld aircraft parts and fix engines now.”
“You flew C-47’s and C-54’s during the war. ‘Gooney Birds’ and ‘Skymasters.’’”
“That’s correct.”
“You were pretty good at it from what I hear.”
“You hear right,” said Taylor. “Brought every single one of those big silver angels home safely. Maybe a bullet hole here or there, but never anything serious.”
“I’d say you deserve a medal, but I happen to know you received three of them,” the visitor said. “Two in France and one in Holland. Impressive stuff. Congratulations.” A pause, then, “You also flew B-17s.”
“Let me make one thing as clear as God’s open sky,” Taylor said. “There’s nothing I can’t fly.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
“Who the hell are you?” Taylor asked. “Let’s cut past the nonsense and talk turkey, all right?”
The visitor looked Taylor in the eye, hard and long.
Then, “There’s going to be an airlift of food and heating supplies from West Germany to Berlin, Mr. Taylor. The public is being told that it will take a few weeks. That’s a load of bullcrap. An airlift will take months.”
“Yeah. So?”
“We’re going to call up some reservists. But we’re also looking for volunteers to go over,” Forsythe said.
“Over where?”
“To Germany. Berlin.”
“And do what?”
“Those C-47s and C-54s aren’t going to fly themselves, my friend,” the visitor said with a laugh. “Here’s the deal. So-so pay. Crappy food. Lousy hours. Nose to nose with the rapacious Russian bear. Plenty of German girls who’ll turn a trick for a Hershey Bar, but they’ve all got VD. Make of that what you will. And there’s always the chance of a fatal accident.”
“At least nobody’s shooting at us.”
“Not yet. But that could change any day. Sounds great, doesn’t it?”
“Nope. I’d have to be crazy.”
“Interested?”
“I get to fly?”
“You get to fly, Glenn.”
“I’m your man,” Taylor said. “See? I’m crazy.”
“Yeah. Your file said that, too. Your peers called you ‘Nutsy Glenn’ and ‘Nutsy Taylor.’ Gifted at low altitudes, sub-radar, narrow corridors, and impossible places. Able to find landing fields where none existed. Once spotted two U.S. wounded soldiers behind enemy lines in Alsace, set down a Stinson Sentinel on a road in a wine field, and picked them up while under fire from pro-Vichy partisans.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Glenn Taylor said. “Sounds like you read my file.”
“I liked your file so much that I memorized it,” Forsythe said.
“The Stinson Sentinel is a great airplane,” Taylor said. “I was supposed to be doing ‘recon’ only. The brass didn’t know whether to court-martial me or give me a medal.”
Taylor laughed.
“That one was a medal,” the recruiter said. “Your second one.”
“Yeah. So it was,” Taylor recalled. “The brass always felt that it looked better if a pilot under their command got a medal rather than a court-martial. You could do the same crazy shit, they just had to spin it right. So that one went in my direction.”
“Smoke?” asked the visitor, pulling a pack of Chesterfields out of his pocket.
“Sure,” said Taylor.
“By the way, meant to ask,” the visitor said. “You a married man?”
“Nope.”
“You like the ladies though, I hope.”
“Sure do. Just never met the right one. Know what I mean?”
“All too well.”
Glenn Taylor re-enlisted on the spot with his old rank of lieutenant.
ii
During the same week, two-thirds of the way westward across the forty-eight American states, Victor Marino had just happily reached two life milestones. After returning from two years in the Army Air Corps, during which he shuttled soldiers around Panama and the Caribbean, he had married his high school sweetheart. His new wife was a woman of twenty-two named Dora who had waited for him throughout the war. Victor had also just finished the academic studies he had begun before the war. He had graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in business. Victor and his missus were ready for anything life could throw their way. Or at least they thought they were.
One evening at dinner Victor’s phone rang. Dora left the dining table in their Oklahoma City apartment, answered, and listened quietly to the caller for several seconds. Victor heard her say, “Just a minute.”
There was something about the stillness in Dora’s tone that bothered him. She returned to the dining room where she met her husband’s gaze. “It’s for you,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Long-distance. Someone asking for ‘Captain Marino’,” she said.
A moment’s pause and then dark thoughts followed.
“Must be a prank or an old pal, honey,” Marino said, rising from the table. “Nobody’s called me ‘Captain’ since I left the service.”
“That’s what bothers me, too,” Dora said.
The caller was neither a prankster nor an old friend. The caller was a man in Langley, Virginia who went by the name of Michael Forsythe. Forsythe was working late, going through a recently updated list of Air Force reservists.
Forsythe’s message was short and sweet. Victor Marino had been reactivated for an impending air operation in Europe and this call was his initial notice. A telegram would follow, which would make it official, said the voice on the long-distance call. Marino was ordered to a base in Maryland for medical examinations, induction, orientation, and new uniforms.
Marino returned to the table dazed. He looked at his wife without speaking. Then, “I thought I was finished with all this crap,” Victor said.
“Where are you being sent?” she asked.
“First Maryland. Then probably Germany.”
“Oh, my God,” she muttered. “If a new war starts…”
A long half-minute of silence followed.
“If you go, I go,” Dora said.
Neither could finish dinner. But as promised, the telegram arrived the next morning. Whoever Mr. Forsythe was, he was a man of his unwelcome word.
iii
In another corner of the United States, a young American named Tommy Olson had grown up on a ranch in Montana. Olson was nineteen, had just completed two years of college in 1943, and had been hell-bent for adventure when a Life magazine cover story appeared addressing the shortage of aircraft transport pilots in the United States.
The pilots – men and women – were civilians who worked with the military to ferry aircraft around the country from base to base while the combat pilots served their time in Europe and Asia. Olson was instantly intrigued, read the article several dozen times, and then tore the article out of the magazine and saved it.
An older Olson brother named Max was training to be a pilot with the United States Army. Why not Tommy? Olson asked their father, Roger Olson, for the money to earn a pilot’s license without enlisting.
“That costs five hundred dollars,” Olson Senior said. “That’s crazy,” he said. “You might be crazy, but I’m not! You think I want both my kids flying around the damned sky?”
Tommy was quiet in response. Young Olson folded two strong arms and gave the old man a look
. The look.
“You sure you want to do that?” Olson Senior pressed.
“I’m sure,” Tommy said. “It’s what I want to do.”
“Hell! I already got one airplane-crazy kid pilot in the family,” Roger Olson said eventually. “I suppose there ain’t nothing wrong with having two.”
“Nope,” Tommy said. “There ain’t. Thanks, Dad!”
Tommy’s dad, a cattle rancher who sometimes used a small plane to survey and watch over his two-thousand-acre spread outside of Billings, came up with the money. Tommy completed the course and was one of the best in the class, both in the sky and on the test papers.
But then there was another problem when Olson went off to join those who would fill the gap in essential wartime aviation. Tommy was half an inch shorter than the five-foot-two-inch requirement. So at the student pilot’s induction physical at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, where most of the transport pilots were trained, Tommy stood on tiptoes before an amiable examiner, a woman named Carol in thick, black, horned-rimmed glasses. Carol was also the town librarian. The public library was across the street.
The height chart was painted on the wall. Even on tiptoes, Olson couldn’t crack the five-two mark.
Carol shook her head. “Certain things we cannot allow,” she said. “Rules are rules. The chart is accurate. I can’t move the paint on the wall and I have to have the right numbers on this sheet of paper.”
“So I can’t fly?”
“You’re too short. Wait here, Tommy,” the examiner suggested. “I’ll be back in a jiffy. I’m just going across the street to get a couple of books.”
Olson waited, assuming the quest to fly was at an end. Carol returned with a dictionary and a phone book from the library. The examiner placed them at the foot of the height chart, one stacked on the other.
“There! Try again,” Carol said.
Tommy stepped on the books and grew three inches.
“Five-four and a half!” Carol recorded. “Very good. On your way, Olson.”
There were many short pilots on the home front during the World War. Instructors looked the other way or found ways to tinker with shoes and height. One instructor even had a thirty-three-inch yardstick for special cases. A lot of aircraft tonnage needed to be moved. Everyone laughed. State and federal inspectors turned blind eyes.
Some of the female aviators even played little games with the official records, using androgynous names. Pilots named Patricia became Pat in the official records. Anyone named Eugenia became Gene. Harriet became Harry. Leslie became Les and Mary and Carol were accidentally misspelled as Mark and Carl.
Volunteers such as Tommy got into a division of the Air Force named The Air Transport Command, the ATC, the strategic airlift component of the United States Army Air Forces. A cottage industry developed in custom tailoring smaller-than-small parachutes and flight jackets to smaller aviators. The normal issue parachutes were too large. If used, the force of the air when leaving an aircraft would have ripped the chute and harness off a body. The ejecting pilot would slip right out.
The ATC had two vital missions. The first was the ferrying of aircraft from the factories in the United States to where they were needed for training or operational use in combat. The second was the delivery of supplies and equipment between the United States and the overseas combat theaters. The ATC also operated a worldwide air transportation system for military personnel and to feed graduates into the WASPs, the Women Air Force Service Pilots.
The ATC was an object of derision by some combat pilots. “The Army of Terrified Civilians,” the fighter pilots called it. “Allergic To Combat.” A third of the aviators in the ATC were female and many of the males were as ragtag a collection of aviators as the United States had ever put in its skies.
Tommy Olson flew more than five hundred thousand miles for the Air Transport Command during World War II. Olson’s territory stretched across the United States but also led far into eastern Canada. Olson specialized at flying into freezing rain, ice, and snow, and having an instinct for it: Labrador, Northern Quebec, and Ontario in the dead of winter.
“I don’t mind it,” Olson said. “Snow is refreshing. Wonderful,” Tommy would explain. “I love its purity. It has a rhythm like the ocean. Go with it, not against it.”
Most of the other aviators held other opinions. A stopover in the Bahamas or Cuba was more desirable. But it took all kinds and all methods to get those silver birds around the country. The job got done. Then the end came rudely and suddenly.
On June first, 1948, the government abolished the ATC as part of the general demobilization that had been set in motion in 1946 and 1947.
Tommy Olson completed a final flight from Houston to St. Louis. From there, Olson took trains to Billings through the Upper Midwest, then a bus that completed the journey to the family ranch that Tommy Olson had left three years earlier.
There were opportunities in Montana. The sky was as big and blue from the ground as it had been when Olson had left to learn how to fly up into it. Olson’s dad looked older and wanted some help with his land. His other child, Max, had returned intact from the Pacific. Now Tommy was home, too.
Everything was copacetic for a short while. The family was happy to be together again. Then reality raised its ugly head. Tommy missed flying. So Tommy Olson was easy pickings for a smooth-talking individual who announced himself as Michael Forsythe on the phone on May second, calling long-distance from the Washington, D.C. area for Tommy Olson.
The caller hesitated for a moment when a woman’s voice – Tommy’s – came on the phone. Then, as he scanned the prospect’s experience sheet in Langley, Virginia, he was reminded of how the females with androgynous names had tweaked their names to make sure they received work and assignments.
He quickly scanned her experience in the ATC where the safety records of female pilots had been better than the hotshot males in the unit.
“What’s ‘Tommy’ from?” Forsythe asked.
“On my birth certificate, it reads Thomasina. I was named after my grandmother. She was from Abruzzo in Italy. Abruzzo is -”
“Abruzzo is on the East Coast of the boot. On the Adriatic Sea,” Mr. Forsythe said. “I traveled through there during the war. On the way to North Africa from Switzerland.”
“Wow! I hope you enjoyed it,” Tommy Olson said.
“I kept moving,” Forsythe said with a laugh. “I was protected by anti-Fascist partisans.”
“Ha!” she said. “I’m sure they got you safely to your destination.”
“I’m alive to offer you a job flying, aren’t I, Tommy?” he answered. “I can call you that, I hope. “Tommy’?”
“I’ve been called that since I was a little girl,” she answered. “I was also kind of a tomboy. I earned the nickname kind of natural.”
“I’m sure,” Forsythe said. “Want to fly again? What do you say?”
“Here’s what I have to say! I’m blessed with the American spirit, you know. I’m always ready to lift off!”
“I’ll mail you a travel allowance, special delivery, plus some paperwork. Can you be in Westover, Massachusetts in a week?”
“Sure can.”
“You might be the only woman. Or one of a very few.”
“Who the hell cares?”
“Not me and obviously not you,” Forsythe said.
The call ended. Tommy was euphoric.
Chapter 10
Cambridge, England – May and June 1948
For the better part of the 1940s, life in Cambridge had been dominated by war and its consequences: lives lost, buildings destroyed, families shattered, ordinary life disrupted. There had been shortages of everything. Beer, ale, and pubs had been viewed during the war as important for morale, but sugar, wheat, and barley had been essential for food. Pubs had had a weekly beer ration and when it was gone, they had to close. They remained open all week by severely limiting their opening times. In major cities, especially when the risk of bombing was at it
s highest, pubs were deserted at night as people headed for the shelters. Now, with the war over, Britain remained a dreary place compared to the United States. But just as in Bath and London, a recovery was crawling forward, fueled in part by visitors from North America.
The landlady on Orchard Street was a gentle lady named Victoria – never “Vickie” – Cameron-Butler. Mrs. Cameron-Butler, sixtyish and thin, had reconfigured her home in 1946 after the big war had ended and after the possibility of destruction by German bombs from the air was no longer a daily worry. Her home on Orchard Street was midway down a block of well-maintained row houses, taller on the north side than on the south. She, too, was a war widow.
Mrs. Cameron-Butler now resided in a modest four-room flat below street level, complete with kitchen and bathroom. Her sitting room at the front of the building had generous windows through which Victoria could gaze up at the world as it passed by, or at least as much of the world as she cared to view.
She rented out the two floors above her to people associated with the University of Cambridge, “presentable, respectable people,” as she called them. The faculty office sent her tightly screened referrals. Her late husband’s father had been a don at the university, a linguistics specialist, so Victoria was well acquainted with the academic community. Cambridge treated her as well as it treated anyone.
Punctually at eleven AM, after the usual morning showers that swept through East Anglia in springtime had concluded and a bright sun swept the city, Bill Cochrane, accompanied by his family, arrived at Mrs. Cameron-Butler’s front door. He knocked twice. The Cochranes were there to inspect and hopefully execute the lease for their short-term rental.
Mrs. Cameron-Butler’s rental suite was currently unoccupied. The lady of the house was more than a little anxious to find the sought-after, presentable, respectable people who might settle into her home and stabilize her uneven finances.
She was thus delighted at first glance to open her door and find a fit, middle-aged man and his wife and a charming daughter holding her mother’s hand, half hiding behind her back.