To Kingdom Come

by Robert J. Mrazek

I tell you all this because I don’t want you to think we are unfeeling or unthinking or extravagant for no reason. We have weighed the odds carefully and know just where we stand. Our morale is our wealth and happiness. We are trying the only way we know how.... We love and miss you terribly. Always, Betsy

  In February 1943, Ted was on his way by train to Spokane, Washington, to be assigned his crew, when he got into trouble again. At one of the stops, he was taken into custody by military police after going to the Western Union office and sending Betsy a telegram telling her how much he missed her.

  He had veiled the words in pig Latin, a jargon that was then the rage among the pilots, in which the beginning consonant of each word was transposed to the end. At the next stop, he was taken off the train and interrogated as a possible enemy spy. The telegraph operator had alerted the military police after reporting that he had used “a secret code.” It took him several hours to convince the police it was harmless.

  At Spokane, Ted was assigned a crew and they began training together. He began using the same principles he had employed as the captain of his championship teams to mold his flight crew into a solid fighting unit. Although air force regulations prohibited fraternization between officers and enlisted ranks, Ted quickly broke the boundaries.

  Every Friday night, he would rent a hotel suite in Spokane for the crew to get together informally and play poker over drinks and dinner. If they were going to be fighting together, he told them, they might as well enjoy being together as friends whenever they had the opportunity. Once inside the suite, it was all on a first-name basis.

  Ted also made sure every member of the crew had his personal affairs in order. He didn’t want them to leave for England with any serious worries. Some of them needed money for their families. He lent it to them. Whatever the problem, he was there with advice and support. All for one. One for all.

  Ted and Braxton spent his final fifteen-day embarkation leave together in Bronxville. The days went by in a blur, and then he was gone. She settled in for the long wait before he came back.

  In England, Ted’s crew was assigned a new Fortress. Together, they decided to name it Battlin Betsy. Ted wrote her that he thought he had the best-trained and most confident crew in the squadron. His copilot, Warren Laws, was very good in the air, calm and competent, and deserved his own ship. The rest of the men not only knew their jobs but could count on one another, no matter how tough things got. His training methods might have been unorthodox, but he thought they had worked out well.

  On August 3, Braxton gave birth to their baby, Katherine Ann. They had already agreed on the name if it was a girl. Less than a week later, a letter was delivered to Ted at Knettishall. Included with it was a photograph of Braxton and their new daughter.

  Dressing in the darkness of his Quonset hut for the Stuttgart mission, Ted put the photograph in the breast pocket of his flight suit over his heart. It would be his sixth mission.

  Jimmy

  Monday, 6 September 1943

  384th Bomb Group

  Grafton Underwood, England

  Second Lieutenant James “Jimmy” Armstrong

  0300

  “Lieutenant Armstrong?” came the disembodied voice behind the flashlight beam. “Briefing in half an hour.”

  The big man slowly hauled himself out of the narrow bunk. His copilot slept in the bed on one side of him, his navigator on the other. He made sure they were awake, too. Still groggy, he had to remind himself of which men remained from the original crew he had been assigned back at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho.

  His flight crew’s confidence was at low ebb, and he wasn’t sure what more he could do to bolster their spirits. Morale in the rest of the 384th Bomb Group wasn’t much better.

  Recent losses had cast a pall over the whole base. The group had lost ten Fortresses in June, and another twelve in July. Jimmy wasn’t worried for himself. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to make it through, but it was hard to maintain crew cohesion with so many men coming and going.

  At times it seemed like his own constantly rotating crew was being sent by the League of Nations. Wilbert Yee, his new bombardier, was Chinese. James H. Redwing, the ball turret gunner, was a Hindu whose family came from India. He spoke English like some professor at Oxford.

  Jimmy’s former copilot, Luke Blanche, was a full-blooded Cherokee from Broken Toe, Oklahoma. The machine gunners included Presciliano Herrera, a Mexican kid, and William Deibert, whose family was German. Sid Grinstein, his original flight engineer and top turret gunner, was Jewish.

  After ten missions, Jimmy had reluctantly concluded that combat leaders in the air force were made, not born. He had come a long way in a short time from the athletic fields at Georgia Tech.

  He was finishing the first semester of his sophomore year when he returned to his dorm room one Sunday afternoon and learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Like his roommates, he was ready to fight. When he signed up for the air corps, the fun-loving giant was also looking for adventure. Ten months later, he was awarded his wings.

  Jimmy was just nineteen years old. Someone told him that he was probably the youngest pilot in the whole air force. His next assignment as a newly minted B-17 pilot was at Hendricks Field in Sebring, Florida.

  To celebrate winning his wings, he flew a Fortress to his hometown of Bradenton, Florida, where he dove down to an altitude of fifty feet before thundering over his parents’ home at two hundred miles an hour, clipping the tops off the Australian pine trees that surrounded the property. The terrified officer flying with him in the copilot seat thought they had blown the roof off the house.

  He came from a clan of warriors. The first Armstrongs in the colonies had arrived from Scotland in the mid-1700s. Two of his ancestors had fought against the British in the American Revolution. During the Civil War, both his great-grandfather and his grandfather rode with Custer’s Michigan Cavalry Brigade. His father had battled German U-boats in the North Atlantic in the last war. After Pearl Harbor, his father had reenlisted to fight the Japanese.

  In spite of his commanding physical presence, his tender age led to many awkward moments. As he tried to explain to his crew, all of whom were much older, he was not only big, but he was “rough cut.”

  The crew had begun flying combat missions in a B-17 named Sad Sack II. The figure of Sad Sack, a cartoon character in Yank, the army newspaper, had been painted on the plane’s nose.

  Things began to unravel for them on their fifth mission, which was the August 12 attack on Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in the Ruhr Valley. In the preflight briefing, the flight crews had been told they would attack the target at an altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, which was far above the range of the German 88-millimeter cannons.

  The briefer was wrong.

  Of the seventeen planes in the 384th that reached the target, five were shot down by 88s. To complicate matters, the air temperature at thirty-one thousand feet was 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Presciliano Herrera, the left waist gunner, had come back with frostbitten hands and was no longer able to fly.

  On August 16, John Heald, Jimmy’s original bombardier, and Sid Grinstein, his flight engineer, were ordered to join another crew as last-minute substitutes on a mission to Paris. The 384th Bomb Group lost only one plane that day, but Heald and Grinstein had gone down in it.

  One day later, Jimmy had flown the Schweinfurt mission.

  Sad Sack II was about a hundred miles into Belgium when the German fighters began coming up from the airfields along their route to intercept them. The attacks were the most intense he had ever encountered.

  Another pilot in the 384th had once claimed to Jimmy that whenever he saw enemy fighters coming, he gave out with a Sioux war whoop on the intercom to inspire his crew. He had died with his crew over Germany back in July. Jimmy didn’t believe in war cries. He just hoped his gunners shot well.

  As Sad Sack II approached Schweinfurt, the bomber directly above them in the formation was hit
by cannon fire, and its right wing burst into flames. Jimmy’s waist gunners began screaming frantically on the intercom that the stricken Fortress was descending straight toward them. Jimmy managed to avoid the other plane, now engulfed in a ball of fire, as it plummeted past them in its death spiral.

  After Wilbert Yee, his new bombardier, dropped their bombs through the flak cloud over Schweinfurt, the attacks intensified again. When a Focke-Wulf 190 suddenly came at them head-on, Jimmy lifted his right wing when he saw the first flashes of the fighter’s guns. It didn’t help. A moment later, machine-gun bullets began smashing into the cockpit. One of them sliced through his copilot’s sheepskin-lined flight jacket and splintered the armor plate behind his seat. Amazingly, he was unhurt.

  The fighters kept on coming, and his gunners kept firing back until they ran out of ammunition. In the next head-on attack, a 20-millimeter cannon shell set fire to his left inboard engine and sprayed the nose section with shrapnel, wounding Yee and Carlin, the navigator. When that engine caught fire, Jimmy feathered it to keep it from running out of control. As they finally approached the French coast, the attacks tailed off. Jimmy brought the Fortress home on three engines.

  Once they were on the ground, Jimmy inspected the plane with James Flynn, his ground crew chief. Hundreds of brass shell casings covered the steel flooring of the fuselage. The metal skin was peppered with shell holes. The cartoon figure of Sad Sack had been almost obliterated by cannon shells. Flynn told him the Fortress was no longer flyable. It was a miracle they had made it back.

  At the edge of the hardstand, Jimmy found Walter House, his radio operator, sitting on the ground and sobbing uncontrollably. At twenty-eight, House was the oldest and steadiest hand among the enlisted men in the original crew. Jimmy went over to talk to him.

  “Sir,” House began, his lips trembling, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t take it anymore.”

  Jimmy didn’t know what to say. According to regulations, a crewman was required to fly unless the plane commander thought he might endanger the rest of the men. If it had been one of the officers, Jimmy would have just told him to buck up and keep flying. But he knew that Walter House had a wife back in Kentucky waiting for him.

  Putting his arm around the older man’s shoulder, the twenty-year-old Jimmy said, “Walter, you need a change of scenery. I’ll ask the squadron commander to give you a few days at a rest camp.”

  House thanked him through his tears.

  The next morning, Sergeant Deibert, the machine gunner who had replaced the frostbitten Herrera, told Jimmy that he wouldn’t fly anymore. He went to the hospital, where a doctor decided he was suffering from battle fatigue and could stand down.

  Maybe it was something he was doing wrong, Jimmy thought. A few days later, he received a letter from the 384th’s group leader, Colonel Budd Peaslee. It read:Lieutenant Armstrong,

  It is an honor and privilege to be able to commend you for your extraordinary achievement on the bombing mission over Germany, 17 August 1943. Your performance of duty on the most important penetration bombing mission yet conducted by this Wing over Germany was superior. In spite of the heaviest enemy fighter and flak opposition yet encountered by any formation, you coolly accomplished your duties as pilot. By your skillful airmanship and courage, you enabled our group and wing to deal a vital blow to the enemy inside his strongest defenses. I, as well as the entire 384th Bombardment Group, am proud of you. Budd J. Peaslee, Colonel, Air Corps, Commanding

  The letter restored Jimmy’s morale, if not the crew’s. Stuttgart would be his tenth mission. At the predawn briefing, he looked up at the planned formation for the group that was chalked on the blackboard, and saw that they had made him an element leader of three Fortresses. Colonel Peaslee, the group commander, made a point of stressing the need for close defensive formations.

  For the first time, it would be his responsibility to keep the element tucked into as tight a formation as possible to protect his two wingmen, Faulkner and Higdon, while providing enough distance from the higher elements to avoid getting hit by their falling bombs.

  With Sad Sack II at a maintenance facility, he and what remained of his crew had been assigned to fly a B-17 named Yankee Raider. He wasn’t familiar with the plane, but hoped it was one of the newer models equipped with Tokyo tanks to extend its range.

  After the intelligence briefing ended, Father Nethod Billy, the Catholic chaplain of the 384th, invited those officers in the flight crews seeking general absolution to receive it on the stage of the briefing room. A small group of officers knelt together to receive his blessing.

  As Jimmy left the briefing hut to drive out to the hardstand, he saw that Rocky Stoner, who was his third copilot, was still carrying his leather satchel. Rocky had begun bringing it aboard the plane before each mission and stowing it in the cockpit behind his seat. Jimmy finally asked him what was in it, and Rocky showed him the contents: socks, underwear, razor blades, candy, toothbrush, and cigarettes.

  When they arrived at the hardstand, Jimmy was shocked at his first glimpse of Yankee Raider. The plane was a battle-scarred heap. Row after row of yellow bombs were painted on the nose of the fuselage, signifying that it had flown dozens of combat missions. The crew was already there, and he could tell they were angry and disheartened. The plane reminded Jimmy of the jalopies his teenaged friends patched together from junk cars.

  His ground chief, James Flynn, gave him the maintenance reports. It was one of the B-17s that had come over in 1942 at the start of daylight bombing. The top turret had been replaced after being blown off on one of the raids. A week earlier, the Yankee Raider had returned to the base without completing its mission, the pilot reporting that its left outboard engine was running very rough, and the inboard engine on the right had suddenly lost forty pounds of oil pressure.

  Since the plane had just come back from the repair shop, they had presumably given the aircraft a thorough inspection before declaring it ready for service again. He hoped so, since he didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  To bolster the crew’s confidence, he decided to do a quick stem-tostern inspection. As he went through the plane, Jimmy kept reassuring each man, telling them that it must be a lucky ship to have survived so long.

  Up in the nose compartment where the bombardier, Wilbert Yee, would hunch over his Norden bombsight, a single .50-caliber machine gun should have been protruding through the Plexiglas nose. It wasn’t there.

  Behind the bombardier’s station was the navigator’s lair, with its desk, compass, drift meter, and instrument panel. Creighton Carlin, the navigator, was responsible for firing another machine gun that poked through an aperture on the left side of the fuselage. It wasn’t armed.

  A hatchway behind the navigator’s desk led up to the cockpit, where Jimmy would be sitting in the left seat, Rocky Stoner in the right. Behind them would stand the crew’s engineer, who was a new replacement named Bruno Edman. It was his job to monitor the instruments and engines in the cockpit, while also manning the top turret if they came under attack. The turret’s twin .50-caliber machine guns spun in all directions except straight back along the fuselage to avoid shooting off the plane’s tail. Jimmy introduced himself to Edman, and they shook hands. Edman reported that his heating unit didn’t work. Jimmy asked Sergeant Flynn to look into it.

  Behind the turret, a narrow steel catwalk led through the bomb bay, where ten five-hundred-pound bombs sat snug in their racks. As he moved through the fuselage, he could see that the plane had been hit many times. Metal patches, one of them as big as a manhole cover, covered the fuselage like scabs on a wound.

  A door at the end of the catwalk led to the small radio compartment in the middle of the ship. His radio operator, Walter House, had returned from the rest camp, and had volunteered to fly again. He seemed all right, and thanked Jimmy for allowing him time off after the Schweinfurt mission.

  Aft of the radio room was a floor hatch that led below the fuselage to the electr
ically powered ball turret, in which twin .50-caliber machine guns could spin and fire in any direction, principally at attackers from below. Sergeant Redwing, the little Hindu ball turret gunner, was waiting for the plane to take off before climbing inside.

  Behind the radio room was the waist compartment, which housed the plane’s waist gunners. Two more .50-caliber machine guns poked through large openings on both sides of the fuselage.

  Jimmy had lost a number of waist gunners since the crew had first been formed. One new replacement had just come aboard. His name was Eldore Daudelin, and he was from New Hampshire. Jimmy welcomed him to the crew. The other new waist gunner still hadn’t arrived.

  In the tail compartment of the B-17’s fuselage, which extended beyond the base of its vertical fin, another pair of .50-caliber machine guns protected the Fortress from any attacker coming at them from behind. Sergeant Cliff Hammock, the tail gunner, was an original member of the crew, and hailed from Arabi, Georgia.

  He was very calm in battle.

  “Fahhghter cummin in at six o’clock,” he would report laconically on the intercom in his molasses-thick Southern accent.

  The crew was standing around the Yankee Raider and waiting for the go signal when a military police jeep pulled up next to the hardstand. It had a single passenger. He was dressed from head to toe in cold-weather flying gear. As Jimmy went forward to meet him, he wondered what the man might have done to require a police escort.

  “Sergeant Olen Grant reporting,” said Reb as they shook hands.

  The man smelled like a brewery, but there was no time to find out his situation.

  “Get up in the nose and arm the bombardier’s and navigator’s guns,” he told Reb.

  It was stifling hot in the nose compartment. Reb was wearing a blue heat suit over his long johns, and the sheepskin-lined flying outfit over all that. By the time he was finished installing the guns, he was soaked with boozy sweat. The navigator glared at him as Reb squeezed by.