“I don’t think it does,” Douglass said. “I’m not even sure it will make it to Hungary. There’s no way one of them could make it to Pécs and then to Vis.”
“Where’s Darmstadter?” Fine asked. “He ought to know.”
“He and Dolan are checking the weather,” Douglass said.
“What’s the priority?” Fine asked rhetorically.
“To get János’s team on the ground in one piece,” Douglass said.
“We could . . . ,” Fine began. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I won’t until I know just what the Gooney Bird can do.”
“Well,” Douglass said, nodding toward a small door in one of the wide hangar doors where an MP, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, was checking the identification of Lt. Commander John Dolan, USNR, Lt. Henry Darmstadter, and Ernest J. Wilkins, “here comes the expert. ”
“Well,” Wilkins said, cheerfully confident, as he walked up to them. “God loves us, apparently. The immediate and twenty-four-hour weather over the drop zone is going to be perfect.”
Douglass laughed nastily.
“Darmstadter,” Fine asked. “What’s the range of a Gooney Bird? Would a Gooney Bird make it one way to Pécs?”
“No,” Darmstadter said immediately.
“What’s wrong with the B-25?” Dolan asked.
“Canidy has cleverly modified the B-25 so that you can’t drop parachutists from it,” Douglass said, “or at least not a team of them, without scattering them all over Hungary. ”
“Good God!” Wilkins said.
“And we can’t put the 17 into Vis,” Dolan said.
“Right,” Fine said.
“Jesus, now what?” Douglass asked. “Canidy expects us at daybreak.”
“So we use the B-17 for the drop,” Dolan said. “And it comes back here. And we send the B-25 to Vis. No problem. ”
“No,” Wilkins said.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Fine asked.
“Maintenance found landing-gear problems,” he said. “They called me and told me it would take twenty-four hours, maybe a little more, to replace what was broken.”
“Then you’ll have to get us another 17,” Fine said.
“There will be a lot of questions asked why someone wants to borrow a bomber,” Wilkins said.
Darmstadter’s mind had been racing. He thought he saw a solution. But he was reluctant to offer it. These people, he told himself, know what they’re doing. I’m just a mediocre Gooney Bird pilot.
And then he thought, Fuck it!
“If there would be only the team, five men, on the Gooney Bird,” he said, “it would be very light. It would take another ton and a half, maybe two, before it got close to Max Over Gross.”
“If you’re talking about fuel,” Dolan said, not unkindly, “we just don’t have time to rig auxiliary fuel tanks.”
“I’m talking about fifty-five-gallon drums,” Darmstadter plunged on, “and hand pumps to replenish the fuel in the main tanks as it’s burned off.”
“Hey!” Dolan said after a moment’s thought.
“Would that work, John?” Fine asked.
“Eight fifty-five-gallon drums would weigh thirty-two hundred pounds,” Dolan said. “A little over a ton and a half. And that would be another four hundred gallons. More than enough to get a Gooney Bird from here to Pécs, and then to Vis.”
“And you can get a Gooney Bird into Vis?” Douglass said.
Dolan thought that over a moment before replying.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I think Brother Darmstadter and I could sit a Gooney Bird down on Vis in one piece.” He caught Darmstadter’s eye and went on. “We’ll have to get the tail wheel down before we hit the stream, going in. If we were still up on the main gear, we’d go over on our nose. Getting out will be easier; we’ll just keep the tail wheel on the ground till we’re through the water.”
Darmstadter nodded his understanding.
“Could Brother Darmstadter and me sit one down in one piece?” Douglass asked.
Dolan looked at him.
“You don’t have hardly any Gooney Bird time, Colonel,” Dolan said, after a moment.
“But I don’t have dysentery, either,” Douglass said. “Canidy told me about your ‘dysentery,’ John.”
“Canidy has a big mouth,” Dolan said. “And I’m all right.”
“I don’t think we can take a chance on that, John,” Douglass said.
“I’m missing something here,” Wilkins said.
“I’m afraid Commander Dolan will not be able to go,” Douglass said. “Whatever plans we make will have to exclude him.”
“First of all, that’d be Fine’s decision,” Dolan said. “And you haven’t heard me out.”
“Go ahead, Commander,” Fine said, and immediately wondered why he had called Dolan by his rank.
“Darmstadter knows more about dropping . . . what is it they say? ‘sticks’ . . . sticks of paratroopers than anybody else. And he’s also the only one of us with any experience to speak of flying a Gooney Bird on the deck. And the only way we’re going to be able to find Pécs and not get ourselves shot down is to go in on the deck.”
“Okay, that takes care of Darmstadter,” Douglass said. “He flies the Gooney Bird. We’re talking about who goes with him. We’re talking about your ‘dysentery,’ Dolan.”
“I was flying cross-country using a road map before anybody else here was out of diapers,” Dolan said. “I’m the only one here who can, for sure, find this meadow Canidy has picked out for us.”
“That presumes you don’t have another . . . attack of dysentery,” Douglass said.
“If, for example, you were to go in the Gooney Bird,” Dolan went on, ignoring him, “that would leave me and Fine to fly the 25 to Vis. Captain Fine is not what you could call an experienced B-25 pilot. I hate to think what would happen if he had to try to land the B-25 on Vis.”
“Dolan, do you think Colonel Douglass could land the 25 on Vis?”
“He stands a much better chance than you do,” Dolan said. “And the kid doesn’t need him in the C-47.”
“And what if you’re not ‘available’ in the C-47?” Fine challenged.
“That’s the chance we have to take, that by me just sitting there in the right seat and letting the kid fly, my dysentery won’t come back.”
Douglass looked at Fine.
“I think we have to go with Dolan,” Fine said. “His main advantage, I think, is that he’s the one with the best chance . . . maybe even the only one with a chance . . . of finding the drop zone.”
3
PÉCS, HUNGARY 0515 HOURS 21 FEBRUARY 1943
Lt. Hank Darmstadter thought that the most difficult part of the flight so far had been taxiing to the end of the runway in Cairo. They had taken off at 2100, which would put them over the meadow outside Pécs at just after daylight. The airfield at Cairo was blacked out, and while Wilkins had been able to arrange for the runway lights to be turned on long enough for them to take off, they had had to be led to the runway from the hangar by a man holding a flash-light in the back of a jeep.
The flashlight-in-the-jeep had been very hard to follow. It was almost impossible to see directly ahead out over the nose of a C-47 with its tail wheel on the ground. C-47 pilots learned to taxi by looking out the side and by swinging the nose from side to side to provide a look ahead through the side windows.
It was difficult following the jeep, but they’d made it to the end of the runway all right, sometimes flicking the landing lights on to make sure of their position. Darmstadter had been a little surprised and flattered that Dolan had not taken over the controls and done the taxiing, but Dolan had left that to Darmstadter.
And from the moment they had lined up with the centerline of the runway, things had gone without a hitch.
Dolan had waited until he’d run the final mag check for the engines, and then he’d called the tower for the lights, and they had come on immediately.
Despite what had turned out because of the air temperature to be four hundred pounds over Max Over Gross, the takeoff had been no problem at all. The only way Darmstadter could tell how heavy they were was a reluctance to pick up altitude. But they had never come close to a stall, and the climb was steady, if slow.
The first leg, the longest, was on a west-northwest course across the desert to the Mediterranean, and then across the Mediterranean far enough south of Crete to avoid a chance encounter with German aircraft based on the island. And then they turned north across the Ionian Sea.
There was almost a half moon, providing what Dolan described as the most they could ask for, enough light for them to make out landmasses and shorelines, but not enough to make it easy for anyone to spot them.
The Strait of Otranto, which separates the heel of the Italian boot from Albania and the Adriatic from the Ionian Sea, came into view just when they expected it to, and they could see both shorelines for a while.
Dolan had planned that that leg of the flight would take six hours and twenty-five minutes. It actually took six hours and two, meaning that they were making better time than anticipated, even with the engines thinned back as much as possible for fuel economy.
Once they had crossed the Strait, Darmstadter had raised the nose slightly, starting a slow climb to 9,000 feet, and Dolan had begun to peer intently out the window looking for the narrow strip of land that ran between the Adriatic and Lake Scutari on the Yugoslav-Albanian border.
Dolan had told him, jokingly, but meaning it, that the secret of “road map” navigation was to look for something on the ground that was large enough to be easily seen and that couldn’t be confused with anything else.
Lake Scutari fit the bill. It was twenty-five miles long and was separated from the Adriatic by a strip of land as narrow as seven miles. It could be easily found, and it could not be mistaken for anything else.
“Steer straight north from the end of the lake,” Dolan said when they had found Lake Scutari, and then he got out of his seat. “I think it’s time to get rid of another drum.”
Lt. János had been shown how to pump fuel from the fifty-five-gallon drums into the main tanks. One of the drums had been “semipermanently” installed, with a line running from its bottom to the main aircraft tank. Fuel from it had been pumped into the main tank, and then that fuel was replenished from other fifty-five-gallon barrels.
The empty tanks didn’t weigh much, but they could not be completely drained, and Dolan was worried that the avgas sloshing around in them would create fumes that would be dangerous. He had gone back into the cabin several times to make sure that as soon as each drum had been emptied, János had thrown it out.
The ground seemed to glow white about that time, and after a moment Darmstadter figured out what it was—the moonlight reflecting back from snow on the ground. That meant they were approaching the mountains in Montenegro, the highest of which was about 7,500 feet. There would be at least 1,500 feet between them and the highest peak, but it was important that they know when they passed over it, so they could safely descend.
Darmstadter had been worried that Dolan would want the controls after they started down and were flying on the deck. There was no question that Dolan was a better and more experienced pilot. But there was also no doubt that he had had a heart attack and might have another.
But Dolan lived up to what he had promised Douglass: that he would “work the road map in the right seat and let the kid fly.”
The only specific instructions Dolan gave him were course changes, and several times the “suggestion” that it would be “okay to go down another couple hundred feet.”
According to the Corps of Engineers’ map (which the Corps had apparently borrowed from Le Guide Michelin), this part of Hungary was sparsely populated. There were here and there a few lights to be seen, but there was no way of telling whether they were a few lights in violation of a village blackout, or lights in single farmhouses.
At 0500, as the sky to the east was starting to glow dull red, Dolan unstrapped himself again and got off the copilot’s seat.
“In eight minutes, maybe ten,” he said, “we should see a few lights. That’ll be Pécs. Or maybe Athens. If you see something round, that’ll be Rome.”
Darmstadter knew he was expected to laugh, and did.
“This has gone so well, I’m afraid to believe it,” Dolan said. “I’ll go back and tell our passengers. János said he wanted fifteen minutes to suit up.”
Dolan was back in his seat before they came onto Pécs, and he was the first to see it.
“Go down on the deck,” Dolan now ordered. “Put that line of hills between us and Pécs. It’s damned near impossible to tell the direction of an airplane if you can’t see it. And the more confused we can leave these people, the better. ”
Darmstadter concentrated on flying as close to the ground as he dared between lines of hills. It was light enough now to make out individual trees, and here and there a road and fields.
And then, surprising him, he flashed over a stream, then a cut-over section of hillside, then above that a meadow on a plateau.
“Christ, is that it?”
“It should be,” Dolan said, “but I don’t see any panels.”
Darmstadter glanced quickly at him. Dolan had a headset on and was working the controls of the radio.
“Not a goddamned thing,” he said.
“What do I do?”
“Stay on the deck under the hill lines,” Dolan ordered. “And make another pass over it. I’ll go see what I can see from the door.”
Five minutes later, from the other direction, the C-47 approached the meadow.
There was no doubt now that they had found their destination. A pile of tree limbs was burning furiously at the near end of the meadow by the cut-over area, the wind blowing the smoke across the meadow and into the forest.
Dolan came into the cockpit.
“It’s up to you now, kid,” he said. “The next pass is all we’re going to get, or everybody will think we’re having an air show up here.”
Darmstadter smiled uneasily.
Dolan went back into the fuselage. There he would strap himself into a harness and take up a position by the open door. When Darmstadter turned the red light on—there were supposed to be red and green lights, but the green wasn’t working—and then off, he would push the first of the parachutists through the door. When they were all gone, he would throw the three equipment bags after them.
Darmstadter made his approach very carefully, slowing the C-47 down as much as he dared, coming in very low and shallow over the tips of the trees in the forest, one hand on the Gooney Bird’s wheel, the other on the toggle switch for the light for the door.
And then he flicked the toggle switch.
He thought he could sense a slight change in the controls, which would mean that he had lost 1,000 pounds of weight—five parachutists—from his gross weight, and that the loss had changed the center of balance.
He had a strange, wild, arrogant thought.
I could have landed this sonofabitch in that meadow! The way the wind is blowing up from the stream, I was making maybe forty knots over the ground. I was going so slow I could see Canidy’s face! And I could have stopped it in plenty of time.
He looked over his shoulder into the aisle for Dolan.
He couldn’t see him at first, and then he did.
Dolan was on the cabin floor on his side, curled up. Darmstadter looked out the windshield, then back. Dolan straightened, grew almost stiff, and then went limp.
4
150 DEGREES 20 MINUTES WEST LONGITUDE 08 DEGREES 35 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE 1725 HOURS 20 FEBRUARY 1943
There were four people on the bridge of the conning tower of the USS Drum as she made fifteen knots on a course of 275 degrees through oil-smooth, gently rolling seas. They were almost exactly halfway around the world from the Adriatic Sea and Budapest, Hungary, where at that moment it was 5:25 A.M., February
21, “the next day.”
The Drum’s captain, Lt. Commander Edwin R. Lennox, USN, and Capt. James M. B. Whittaker, USAAC, were in clean and pressed but unstarched khakis. Commander Lennox wore a battered brimmed cap whose cover was once white, but was now nearly brown with oil stains. Captain Whittaker was hatless.
The talker, with a headset and microphone device over his head, was also hatless. He wore a light blue denim shirt and a darker-shade pair of denim trousers, as did the lookout, who also wore a blue sailor’s cap, the brim of which he had turned down all around.
The lookout, Commander Lennox, and Capt. Whittaker all had identical Navy-issue Bausch & Lomb ten-power binoculars on leather straps around their necks.
Commander Lennox looked at his wristwatch, and then, with a sailor’s eye, at the darkening sky.
“Anytime you’re ready, Jim,” Commander Lennox said, “you can go below.”
Whittaker smiled.
“Aye, aye, Sir,” he said. “Permission to leave the bridge?”
“Granted,” the Drum’s captain replied, smiling back.
They had grown to like each other on the voyage from Pearl Harbor. Lennox had thought about the growing friendship a good deal during that time—remembering what he had been told by a full lieutenant when he’d been an ensign aboard the Kingfisher: He’d been told that her skipper wasn’t really such a hard-nosed sonofabitch as he seemed, but that a skipper couldn’t afford to have friends, that command was indeed a lonely thing.
He had accepted that then because he was an ensign, and ensigns believe what they are told by full lieutenants. But it was only after they had given him the Drum, his first command, that he’d really understood it. The master of a man-of -war could not have friends. He could be civil and courteous, but there had to be a wall between the skipper and everybody else aboard. It had a little to do with “familiarity breeds contempt,” but there was more to it than that. The captain had to appear omniscient to his crew, and one of the best ways to do that, especially if you were convinced that at least two of your officers were far smarter than you were and better leaders of men, was to be aloof, to be somewhat mysterious, to share no opinion or confidences with anybody.
The Fighting Agents Page 36