To Kingdom Come

by Robert J. Mrazek

  It wasn’t a good beginning.

  Outside, Jimmy pointed to a stack of crated ammunition on a tarp behind the plane. Put two more aboard, he said, telling Reb that they had run out of ammo on the Schweinfurt mission, and he didn’t want it to happen again.

  The wooden crates of belted .50-caliber ammo weighed almost two hundred pounds. Daudelin, the other replacement waist gunner, helped him carry the two crates into the compartment, where they stacked them in front of the door to the tail compartment.

  Shooting flares erupted across the airfield, which signaled the pilots to begin taxiing out to the runway. Reb sat down next to his gun mount in the waist compartment as the Yankee Raider moved off the hardstand.

  Just before takeoff, he always felt an unreasoning fear that the bomb-laden plane wouldn’t lift off the runway into the sky. As the plane gathered speed, he couldn’t help but think what a mess they would make if they blew a tire.

  Then they were airborne.

  Reb watched the little Indian guy climb into the ball turret. You had to be small to fit inside the plastic bubble under the ship. Even so, Redwing had to sit with his knees practically up to his chest.

  Reb yelled over to Daudelin to ask where they were going.

  “Stuttgart,” Daudelin said.

  Reb had no idea where it was, but he realized he was very hungry, and hoped it wouldn’t be a long mission. He hadn’t eaten anything since the fish and chips he had wolfed down the previous evening in Leicester before meeting Estella. He hadn’t slept much, either.

  Pulling out a plug of his favorite tobacco, he took a bite as the Yankee Raider circled the airfield with the rest of the formation. After chewing it thoughtfully, he spit a wad of tobacco juice onto the steel deck.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Daudelin. “You’ll have to clean that mess up when we get back.”

  “Who says we’re coming back?” said Reb.

  THE MISSION

  Juggernaut

  Thurleigh, England

  306th Bomb Group

  Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti

  First Lieutenant Martin “Andy” Andrews

  0420

  The black sky over Thurleigh had bared its first hint of dawn when Andy Andrews emerged from the 306th’s briefing hut with his copilot, Keith Rich, and got into one of the jeeps waiting to ferry the flight crews out to their planes.

  The reek of exhaust fumes filled the air, along with the deafening racket of airplane and truck engines. It was pungent enough to sting the eyes. As on all mission mornings, the air base was a frenetic scene of activity, with headlight-dimmed vehicles crisscrossing the field in every direction.

  Low-belly tankers were coming back from the hardstands after delivering aviation gas. Smaller trucks hauling trailers loaded with five-hundred-pound bombs crisscrossed in both directions, along with deuce and a halfs carrying ammunition, flanked on both sides of the concrete paths by flight-suited crewmen heading out to their Fortresses on bicycles.

  Andy was approaching the hardstand where Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti was parked when his driver suddenly stopped short. Ahead of them in the murky light, another jeep had overturned into a ditch, throwing its passengers out onto the concrete apron.

  One man was lying on the pavement and screaming in pain as Andy ran toward the jeep. It was Sergeant Leo Liewer, Andy’s top turret gunner and crew chief. Because Liewer was always steady in combat, Andy considered him the most important enlisted man in the crew. Another crewman, Corporal Kenneth Rood, the ball turret gunner, had been in the jeep, too, but appeared to be just shaken up.

  Liewer had suffered a horrific fracture in his right leg. One of the bones was protruding through his pants. He had already lost a lot of blood, and Andy used his white silk scarf to fashion a tourniquet around Liewer’s thigh before injecting his shattered leg with an emergency vial of morphine he carried in his flight suit.

  He continued to cradle the injured man in his arms until an ambulance arrived. After Liewer was on his way to the base hospital, Kenneth Rood approached Andy and told him he couldn’t fly the mission. Although the eighteen-year-old was physically uninjured, his hands were shaking. Andy told him it was all right, and that he would ask for replacements for both men as soon as he got to the plane.

  The rest of the crew was visibly nervous when Andy arrived at the hardstand and they saw his bloody flight suit. After telling them what had happened, he began his regular check of the airplane with the ground chief. He had just finished when the two last-minute replacements, Ralph Biggs and Guido DiPietro, arrived.

  After welcoming the new men, Andy climbed into the cockpit and tried to relax for a few minutes. Although he didn’t consider himself religious, he knew that in a few hours they would be raining close to a thousand tons of bombs down on Stuttgart, Germany, and not all of the victims would be fire-breathing Nazis. Women, children, and elderly people would be killed, too. As he always did before a mission, he delivered a silent apology for the innocent lives that might be taken.

  Far off to the left, he saw the flash of a flare gun above the Thurleigh control tower. It was the signal for the pilots to start their engines. There was no time to read a passage from the “Choric Song” of The Lotos-Eaters.

  He pressed the starter button for the left outboard engine and heard the familiar whine as he injected a charge of fuel to prime it. The engine roared into life with an effusion of greasy smoke, and he began the same process with the inboard engine, closely monitoring the oil pressure and temperature gauges. He repeated the same steps with the third and fourth engines.

  A second flare burst over the Thurleigh control tower. It was the signal for the Fortresses to taxi to the runway, forming into the takeoff line ordained at the premission briefing.

  When the ground crew removed the wheel chocks from in front of the tires, Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti began rolling slowly off the hardstand onto the perimeter apron. Beyond the left wing, Andy’s ground chief was walking alongside the plane, gazing up at him like an apprehensive father worried about his son’s first solo trip in the family car.

  Andy gave him a reassuring wave, his fingers still sticky from Liewer’s blood.

  Buckinghamshire, England

  High Wycombe Abbey

  Eighth Air Force Bomber Command

  0430

  For the operational planners at High Wycombe, the task of organizing a maximum-effort mission against Germany was akin to assembling a gigantic jigsaw puzzle in the sky.

  Zero hour for the Stuttgart mission had been set at 0720, the precise moment when all sixteen bomb groups participating in the attack on Stuttgart were expected to be in their respective positions in the twenty-mile train of bombers, each squadron in its assigned position within a group, each group in its designated place within a multigroup combat box formation, each combat box formation in its assigned position within the two bombardment wings, the entire armada of heavy bombers ready to depart for the enemy coast.

  The combat box formations were critical to their chances for survival.

  Colonel Curtis LeMay, who now commanded the Fourth Bombardment Wing, had created the concept of the combat box after flying a number of missions as commander of the 305th Bomb Group in 1942. It was as important to the development of the modern air war against Germany as the creation of the British square had once been in defending against a French cavalry charge.

  LeMay’s combat box formation began with an individual bomb group, which for a maximum effort consisted of twenty-one Fortresses divided into three squadrons, with the lead squadron out in front, the high squadron following closely behind and to the right at a slightly higher altitude, and the low squadron tucked in behind and beneath the lead squadron on the left.

  LeMay’s multigroup box formation utilized this same configuration on a larger scale. It typically consisted of three bomb groups, with the twenty-one planes in each group flying in the same staggered formation. The box was stacked by altitude, with the lead gro
up in front, the low group below it, and the high group above it.

  If the pilots were able to maintain a tight formation, the LeMay combat box created the maximum opportunity for massing the combined power of the Fortresses’ .50-caliber machine guns in interlocking fields of fire.

  The staggered formation in the combat box also contributed to better bombing accuracy. Once over the target, the groups were able to release each plane’s bomb payloads in a concentrated pattern without endangering the Fortresses flying at lower altitude.

  For the Stuttgart mission, which entailed the largest force to ever be sent against a target deep inside Germany, the assembly of the air armada in the skies over southern England was a mission in itself.

  If all went well, it would take nearly two hours to put the train of bombers together. Since it would also be the longest mission ever undertaken, conserving fuel would be essential. It was vital that the assembly take place smoothly.

  At the sixteen American air bases near medieval English villages like Bury St. Edmunds, Thorpe Abbotts, Molesworth, Grafton Underwood, Thurleigh, and Knettishall, the pilots of 338 Fortresses sat in their cockpits and watched the minute hands of their synchronized watches ticking down to the takeoff times that were set for them at the preflight briefings.

  For the 388th Bomb Group in Knettishall, the first set of Frag (fragmentary) orders for the Stuttgart mission had arrived from High Wycombe on the group’s Teletype machines at 2240 the previous night. After officially logging them in, the operations staff began preparing briefing notes for the flight crews, including an updated weather advisory, a group formation plan, and the final order of takeoff for the group’s twenty-one bombers.

  At exactly eighty-one minutes before zero hour, the 388th was to rendezvous with the 96th Bomb Group, which had been chosen to lead the air fleet. Their rendezvous would be at an altitude of forty-five hundred feet over the 96th’s air base at Snetterton Heath.

  To avoid possible confusion with one of the other fifteen bomb groups circling in the skies, the lead pilot of the 96th group would signal its presence by firing two yellow flares. The lead pilot of the 388th would respond by firing one yellow and one green flare to indicate his arrival before taking up position behind the 96th.

  The two groups would then proceed to climb in slow circles to an altitude of six thousand feet, where, at seventy-two minutes before zero hour, the 96th and the 388th groups would rendezvous with the 94th and 385th Bomb Groups over Fakenham, the ancient Saxon parish in Norfolk. Once those two groups were in tow, additional couplings of the bomber train would take place at seventy-five hundred feet, fourteen thousand feet, and seventeen thousand feet.

  At 0720, the assembly of all sixteen bomb groups would hopefully be achieved as the lead Fortress in the 96th Bomb Group arrived over the coastal village of Dungeness, England.

  Knettishall, England

  388th Bomb Group

  Second Lieutenant Ted Wilken

  0515

  In the gloom of breaking dawn, Ted Wilken and his copilot, Warren Laws, waited for the takeoff signal, still pondering everything that had already gone wrong that chaotic morning.

  After the intelligence briefing, the two officers had arrived at their hardstand with the rest of the crew to learn that Battlin Betsy had been scratched from the Stuttgart mission due to radio communication problems. It created a brief stir of anger and disappointment.

  Each B-17 had its own personality. There was something reassuring about a plane that was deemed to be lucky, and Battlin Betsy, which had been named for Ted’s wife, had been deemed just that. They hated not being able to fly in her, particularly on what might prove to be a tough mission.

  The spare plane they were assigned was named Patricia, and its fuselage was adorned with the garish painting of a nude woman. Warren Laws didn’t appreciate the artwork. A serious young man, he was engaged to be married to his college sweetheart, Libby, and wasn’t comfortable with the lurid symbolism.

  As they were doing their preflight checks, the crew’s regular bombardier, Gene Cordes, turned up ill, and Ted had to send for a last-minute replacement. When the new man arrived, it was too dark for Ted to even see his face as he disappeared into the nose compartment.

  When Warren began checking over the equipment in the plane, he found that all their throat microphones were missing. Without them, there would be no way for the crew to communicate on the intercom. He dropped down through the forward belly hatch, jumped on his bicycle, and rode like the devil over to the squadron commander to report the problem. The commander proceeded to ream him out for failing to take care of his duties, and the flustered Warren never thought to tell him that they had just been assigned a spare plane.

  He got back to Patricia with the throat mikes, only to discover that his parachute was missing from the pile of officers’ chutes that the enlisted men had brought out to the hardstand. Shortly before their scheduled takeoff, one of the crewmen located an extra chute, and Warren stowed it under the copilot’s seat.

  With the preflight checks completed, Ted and Warren waited for the signal flare to start their engines. The two young officers had come a long way from the day they met back in Spokane when the crews were assigned. At first, they weren’t sure what to make of one another.

  Ted was a blue-blooded socialite with famous friends, had prepped at Choate and attended Dartmouth, was a superb athlete, larger than life, a born leader. He made everyone in the crew feel like they were the luckiest guys in the Eighth Air Force to have him as their plane commander.

  Warren was guileless and introspective. He was a good listener. He made friends by listening to people talk about themselves. When the crew got together for poker games at Ted and Braxton’s hotel suite, Warren would stand in the background with a big smile on his face sipping a soft drink. I play bridge, he said. Sometimes, he seemed to disappear within himself.

  Although they hailed from different worlds, the two men had grown up close to one another, Ted in Bronxville, New York, and Warren in Stratford, Connecticut, a village founded by the Puritans in 1639 at the edge of Long Island Sound.

  As a child, Warren suffered from asthma, and his mother became highly protective of him, not allowing the boy to enter grade school until he was seven. On Halloween, he was permitted to wear a costume, but not allowed to go outside. He would sit at the front window and watch the other children as they trick-or-treated down his block.

  When he was nine years old, an event took place that changed his life.

  It was the morning of May 20, 1927, and he was at home listening to the live radio coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s attempt to become the first man to cross the Atlantic alone in the Spirit of St. Louis. Warren could hear Lindbergh gunning the plane’s engine in the background before he took off down the runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island.

  When Warren heard the announcer say that Lindbergh planned to turn east over Long Island Sound, he rushed out of his house in the hopes of seeing him fly past. Looking up into the sky, Warren suddenly heard the sound of a distant plane engine. It was out over the water and he couldn’t see the plane, but for a minute or two he could hear the distinctive whine of the Wright Whirlwind engine, all the time imagining the young Lindbergh in the cockpit as he flew alone into the unknown.

  From that moment on, he wanted to fly.

  The worldwide economic depression altered his career plans, as it did for so many others. In the 1930s, there was no demand for pilots, but there was always a need for teachers, and as the war approached, he was finishing his education at Danbury Teachers College. While there, he fell in love with a fellow student, Elizabeth “Libby” Minck, and they became engaged. The vivacious Libby was committed to helping Warren “have more fun” in life.

  Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It came as a shock to Warren’s family when he went straight up to Hartford the following day and volunteered for the army air forces, just as Ted Wilken had done that same day in Manhattan.

  T
hey may have been different men, but in the course of training together, they learned they could count on one another. Warren never disappeared within himself while in the air. He was always focused on the tasks at hand, and ready to deal with the unforeseen problems that often cropped up in the heavy bombers. Unlike many copilots, he seemed born to the controls, and Ted felt comfortable turning the plane over to him.

  At 0515, the two men watched an exploding flare shoot skyward near the control tower.

  Major Ralph Jarrendt was leading the 388th that morning in Gremlin Gus II. At exactly 0530, Jarrendt thundered forward at full power between the twin rows of amber runway lights. He was followed at forty-second intervals by the rest of the lead squadron: Iza Angel II, commanded by George Branholm; Earl Melville in Shedonwanna?; Roy Mohr in Shack Up; and Bill Beecham in Impatient Virgin.

  Demetrios “the Greek” Karnezis came next in Slightly Dangerous II.

  After the eight bombers of the high squadron were up, it was the low squadron’s turn. Al Kramer led the way in Lone Wolf. After Kramer’s bomber clawed its way skyward to join the other two squadrons, Ted Wilken shoved the throttles forward in Patricia, and the B-17 began lumbering down the strip, followed by Dick Cunningham in In God We Trust, Lew Miller in an unnamed plane, James Roe in Silver Dollar, and Mike Bowen in Sky Shy.

  It was 0540.

  As soon as they were all in the air, the 388th began circling over Knettishall until each pilot found his respective slot in the group formation. When they were all in proper position, Ralph Jarrendt led them toward their first rendezvous point with the 96th group.

  By then, the night mist had finally dissipated, giving way to a beautiful morning, with puffy cumulus clouds dotting the sky. Looking west, Joe Schwartzkopf, the big bear of a radio operator in Ted’s plane, could see dozens of Fortresses climbing up from their fields across the English Midlands.