Then next day Stewart borrowed Colonel Timberlake's cub, Fearless Fosdick, flew low over the palace lawn, and dropped the book. When he got back, Timberlake was waiting with a teletype from the Air Ministry. "H.M. Government takes a dim view of aircraft dropping objects on Sandringham Palace," said the CO. "A servant took your number." Stewart received a series of reprimands, although the admonitory officers had a hard time keeping straight faces.
Surrounding the American bases in Libya and filtering ubiquitously through them, peddling melons and eggs and salvaging bits of loose gear, was the indigenous population, mostly nomadic herdsmen belonging to the Senussi Brotherhood of Islam, which believed that the next Prophet would be born to a man. Senussi males wore tight trousers with incongruously baggy seats in readiness for this event. The American security people were not much concerned over them. Before departing their Libyan colony, Italian forces had delivered Senussi allegiance to the Allies, free of charge. The fascists punished petty thievery by cutting off Arab noses. To teach respect for Mussolini, they seized the Great Mukhtar, the spiritual head of the Brotherhood, trussed him up, and dropped him from an airplane two miles over the Senussi village of Solluch.
During the fluid land fighting, Senussi rangers, unbidden by the Allies, stalked Axis movements and ieported them to the British. When the Americans came, they too fell under the protection of the stealthy Brotherhood. One night Italian saboteurs landed from a submarine, killed two American guards, and blew up four airplanes. The Senussi fell on the gumshoe men and cut them up sorely before the Italians could find British antiaircraft men to take their surrender.
Life was elemental in the bomber encampment. "About dusk the desert comes to life with all manner of animal and insect life," said Captain Jack Preble. "The greatest pests are jerboa mice and desert rats. Herodotus described the jumping rodents of the Libyan deserts as being 'two-legged.'" The airmen tried to protect food by hanging it in bags on lines between tent poles. The rats leaped six feet, clutched the bags, and gnawed through to the delicacies. Captain Ernie Parker sat up one night with a .45 gun to ambush rats. He spied one forcing its way into his roommate's locker and killed the animal with one shot. The bullet went on through his friend's dress uniform.
Captain Benjamin Klose, a Circus bombardier, was trudging through the rain when he saw a sight that made him philosophical. "Out in the open," he said, "there sat a lieutenant general on an oil drum privy. This desert is the right place to fight a war. They ought to ship the generals and politicians from both sides down here and let them slug it out." A muddy clerk put it another way: "This war in Africa is being fought to see who doesn't have to keep the place and the Eyetalians have us licked."
Mail from the States was months late, but the men had plenty of time to write home. A mechanic, lacking anything better in the way of news, wrote his girl, "Last night we licked the officers at softball." When she opened the letter there was a postscript: "Like hell they did. Capt. Harry Schilling, Squadron Censor."
The airmen had nothing to drink except boiled water and coffee, although an enterprising sergeant found the only bottle of cola in Egypt, scrounged a tot of Nelson's Blood, and advertised on his tent: CUBA LIBRE, 250 EGYPTIAN POUNDS. However, a miracle was passed one day in the officers' mess. Captain James A. Gunn, who was to be lost at Ploesti, greeted a weatherbeaten visitor in South African naval uniform, who introduced himself, "Peter Keeble. Working in the harbor." Gunn said, "Sorry, Commander, I can't offer any refreshment." Keeble said, "Matter of fact, I've got a flask in my car. Would you have your guards pass it through the gate?"
A British lorry entered and discharged a hundred cases of Scotch. "Gift of the Royal Navy," said Keeble. "Where the hell did you get it?" Gunn asked. "Bottom of the harbor," Keeble replied. While clearing shipwrecks, his divers had entered the S.S. Hannah Möller, sixty feet down, to dynamite her, and had found an intact cargo of 1,000 cases of whiskey and 200,000 quarts of Canadian beer.
Companionship was one of the few of life's pleasures available to them. They were lucky in their chaplains and special service officers. Captain Brutus K. Hamilton, the famous Olympic track coach, was a much-loved morale officer for the Circus, as was its Protestant chaplain, James Burris. Captain Gerald O. Beck of Cincinnati, Ohio, was the picturesque white-haired Roman Catholic chaplain of the Sky Scorpions. A Protestant, Philip Ardery, said of him: "If there was no rabbi on hand, Father Beck would preach a Jewish funeral service with perfect form and dignity. When no Protestant chaplain was available, he would give all aid and comfort to Protestant boys, without pushing his religion on them. He slept in various tents with the enlisted men, carrying his cot and bedding from one group to the next, each anxiously awaiting the visit. The crews superstitiously believed they would not be shot down as long as he was sleeping in their quarters. Father Beck also had a worldly side. He loved to gamble on cards and dice, was nearly always a heavy winner, and gave the money to charity. I saw him make six straight passes with the dice one night and break up the game. No one dared fade him on the seventh roll. One time before we went on a rough mission, I lay in my cot and heard him talking to the Catholics outside the tent: 'I want to urge you now to prepare yourself for this dangerous task. Go to confession before take-off. And, if you find a good priest, let me know and I'll go with you.'"
Souls were one thing and serviceable airplanes were another. In the bomber domain the omnipresent, indispensable man was a short, big-chested, swarthy individual with graying hair who drove a jeep day in, day out, coming in a pillar of dust or a fountain of mud to the far-flung aircraft. He was the legendary Ulysses S. Nero, Billy Mitchell's sergeant, now a colonel charged with providing an impossible number of airplanes for the missions. At breakfast General Ent might say, "I want a hundred planes tomorrow," and Sam Nero would say, "There are only eighty-seven fit to fly." The general would say, "I want a hundred." The next dawn would find dogged mechanics putting the last touches to No. 100 as the mission warmed up. Nero slept adequately only when the three-day khamseen blew, and he never took a leave.
The men wore any sort of uniform they could find. One day in the chow line, a G.I. noticed an elderly, unshaven individual in a U.S. leather flight jacket without insignia. He looked again and ran for Colonel Timberlake. The colonel arrived on the double and said, "Sir, we had no idea you were here or . . ." It was General Sir Harold Alexander, the British commander in chief for Africa. He grinned at Timberlake's costume -- British Army battle dress.
The greatest pleasure was bathing naked in the warm blue Mediterranean, generals and privates stripped to the same rank. A thousand miles away their coming adversaries went swimming too. Colonel Woldenga, on an unannounced inspection of the Mizil fighter base near Ploesti, found a large swimming pool that had not been there two weeks before. His fighter pilots were vying in fancy dives before a throng of Romanian and German girls. They had scrounged the cement from Gerstenberg's blast-wall construction.
As Tidal Wave came nearer, the Liberator men were ordered on missions to Italy to soften Rommel's rear for the Sicilian invasion. Over Naples, bombardier Alfred Pezzella made a quip that immortalized him in the force. He was glued to his bombsight when a hunk of flak entered between his feet and ripped out a hole over his head. Without taking his eyes from the crosswire, Pezzella flung up an arm and called, "Ball one!" He was to die at Ploesti.
The desert air war got little attention from war correspondents. They were in England, helping put over daylight, high-level, precision bombing. Few noticed the absence of all of Eaker's Liberator groups, which had gone to Africa for Tidal Wave. The occasional visitor from the States who ventured into the inhospitable desert came with the impression that the Ninth Air Force had an easier war than the embattled Eighth. Alfred Kalberer, the Halpro holdover, said: "A War Department wheel and two big air force doctors happened to be visiting Benghazi when a plane came in firing flares for wounded aboard. We took the V.I.P.'s with the ambulance to meet the ship. The inside looked like somebody ha
d been sloshing buckets of red paint around. It was frozen to the metal during the high altitude flight. The top turret gunner's head had been blown off, and he became a fountain of blood before his fingers, half frozen to the grips, came loose and let the body fall to the deck. One of the doctors fainted. An old crew chief dismissed the retching men, lifted the body out, and cleaned the airplane."
A few weeks before Tidal Wave a disturbing personality came to Benghazi. He was a short, fair-haired Royal Air Force squadron leader named George C. Barwell, the world's leading air-gunnery theoretician. Barwell, a masterful mathematician, was the son of a Cockney officer of the London Machine Gun Regiment who had died in the Great War. Barwell had been washed out of R.A.F. pilot training because of his annoying habit of questioning the instructors' dogmas. Training Command had to grind out pilots by the book and would not slow down classes to deal with Barwell's challenges. He was shunted into bombers as a gunner. After several night missions Barwell announced to one and all that gunnery training was unrealistic. "The gunner's limited practice firing at towed targets has no relation to the ultimate problem of defending his aircraft against fighters traveling at great speed in three dimensions," he said. "In combat, the ill-trained men blaze away at multiple simultaneous attacks and self-infficted damage is a terrifying by-product of their training."
Barwell proved his own theories in fifty night battles over Germany, during which he shot down several opponents. Once, when his pilot turned back from flak over the target, Barwell berated him on the intercom: "Your job is to put it straight through the letter box." Back in England the pilot so couched his flight report that he received a decoration, so Barwell denounced him again in the officers' mess. Soon thereafter "flak-happy" Barwell found himself assigned to Berka Two, the R.A.F. base at Benghazi, as a gunnery instructor. The field was surrounded by five Liberator bases building up for Ploesti. Barwell was drawn to the bristling guns of the B-24's like a politician to so many baby carriages.
He met General Uzal Ent, "a charming man, who liked to talk gunnery." The American knew there was plenty wrong with U.S. aerial marksmanship and borrowed the incisive Britisher from the R.A.F. as a gunnery lecturer to help his airmen through the coming Ploesti ordeal. Next day they were enticed from their tents by an earnest Englishman who drew pictures in the sand and angled his hands, talking big air battles. "Now, you chaps are doing it all wrong," said Barwell. "Here's Jerry coming at you from ten o'clock high at three hundred fifty miles an hour. And you make the mistake of leading him." They treated him with scoffing tolerance. For Barwell's first formal lecture Uzal Ent had to drive them into the briefing hut. The Briton began, "The gunner's problem of calculating relative air speeds, altitude, temperature and a dozen other variables, is beyond the ability of most mathematicians, let alone a hurriedly trained air gunner." That brought an American groan comparable to the parliamentary cry of "Oh, sir!" The gunners reassured themselves by looking down at the silver wings on their chests that proclaimed them qualified marksmen.
The pest continued, "Fighters are shot down largely by accident, at tremendous cost to your own planes." The crowd growled. "You have wonderful computing gunsights," Barwell ploughed on, "but they are so complicated that it is impossible to use them properly in combat. For example, take your gyro gunsight . . ." Laughs broke out from men who had decided Barwell was a Limey double-talk comedian masquerading as a flier. He continued, "The system of gunnery that has proven itself in combat is called position firing." It was his own theory, at variance with British and U.S. doctrine. "Position firing is based on the fact that the attacking fighter's problem is equal and opposite to that of the gunner in the bomber. This applies, of course, only during the curve of the pursuit fighter attack." Snores were heard, and laughter in growing volume, despite the British Distinguished Flying Cross on the lecturer's tunic. But there was also a puzzled element, whose minds turned over during this upsetting talk. After the lecture they surrounded Barwell. "Look, if you know so much about it, how about coming up with us and showing how it works?"
Barwell was a grounded instructor, and besides, foreigners needed special permission to fly U.S. missions. He said nothing about this. Some Americans muttered, "The Limey is yellow." Barwell turned up uninvited at the first briefing of the freshmen Sky Scorpions. Their leader, Colonel Jack Wood, said Bomber Command had offered a choice among four relatively shallow targets for their initiation. Sentiment veered toward the nearest one, a German air base at Maleme, Crete. Barwell said, "That one won't be easy. It hasn't been bit for a fortnight and Jerry will be quite eager." The Americans voted defiantly for Maleme. Barwell said, "Very well, I volunteer for top turret in Tailend Charlie." The last plane in the formation was the most vulnerable to fighters.
He did not put his name down as a member of Philip Ardery's crew in Tailend Charlie as they flew off to the target he had warned them against. Worse was in store at Maleme than Barwell had anticipated. The night before, British forces had staged a fake commando and paratroop invasion of Crete in which they dropped thousands of plastic doll parachutists with toy guns that sparked on the way down. The Germans were kept up all night wasting shoe leather, ammunition and tempers and were eager to sock back at somebody for the stunt. Wood's greenhorns flew right into it. On the bomb run, three dozen hot Messerschmitts of the latest mark climbed savagely into the B-24's.
The Liberator gunners freighted the sky with bullets, firing continuously in all directions. Friendly shells crashed past a waist gunner's ear. Furiously rattled, he was going to fire back at "the bastard," when his buddy knocked his aim away from the other Liberator. During the bedlam Barwell's twin fifties remained silent. He stood in the top turret with a chronometer and note pad, recording incidents that would prove instructive later.
A Liberator exploded and fell. The young men stared in disbelief at the injustice. The age-old shock to the maiden warrior's soul -- "They are trying to kill me ! What did I ever do to them?" -- was felt in all hearts save one. Barwell saw a fighter coming with blazing guns. He said, "Tail gunner, don't lead him. Fire right into him." As the fighter passed undamaged, Barwell gave him an economical squirt and the Messerschmitt broke up. "Navigator, credit one certain to the tail gunner," said Barwell. On the next fighter pass, the Briton's borrowed guns jammed, and he returned to note-taking.
Carried away by his educational opportunity, Barwell flew mission after mission, sometimes two a day, never putting himself on the sortie roster. "It was rather nerve-racking," he said. "The Americans swung from ridicule to extravagant praise. Since they were always given to extreme claims of enemy aircraft destroyed, they went around saying I personally shot down everything. If I'd destroyed all those Jerries, there'd have been no German air force left. Actually, I may have gotten seven or eight while flying with the American chaps. The boys wrote home to their mums, talking big about me, and I got touching letters and homemade biscuits from the States. They called me Lucky Barwell. I was trying to be scientific, but don't forget, one did need luck."
Leon Johnson's Eight Balls also entered the air war in the Mediterranean theater. On their first raid, Pilot Robert Lehnhausen was shot down into the sea. He was picked up from a life raft by a British mine sweeper carrying General Montgomery's staff to Malta for the Sicilian invasion. In a Maltese hospital an American infantry colonel asked him, "Did you people come out here to bomb Ploesti?" Lehnhausen had never heard of the place. He said, "I wouldn't know, sir."
At the time, from Brereton's Cairo H.Q., General Richard Royce was writing General Arnold, "Security around this headquarters is practically nonexistent. All the typists and file clerks are hired locally and I suspect every one of them. The city is full of people gathering and selling information." Strangers approached U.S. airmen on leave in Cairo and asked, "When are you going to bomb Ploesti?"In Bucharest, Gerstenberg was pondering the same question.
Sir Richard Grenville persuaded the company, or as many as he could
induce, to yield themselves unto God,
and to the mercy of none else:
but, as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies,
they should not now shorten the honor of their nation by prolonging
their own lives for a few hours or a few days.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Last Fight of H.M.S. Revenge, 1591
4 COMING BACK IS SECONDARY TODAY
Ten thousand feet above the Bay of Biscay, the happy hunting grounds of Nazi fighters based in "neutral" Spain, five Liberators from England drummed south for Africa on the ninth of July 1943. In this area, a month before, German fighters had shot down an unarmed passenger plane, carrying the actor Leslie Howard to his death. In Captain Hugh Roper's lead B-24, the Tidal Wave architect, Gerald Geerlings, sat on a heap of numbered anonymous parcels containing the charts, films and table models of Ploesti. Should one item fall into enemy hands, the mission would have to be canceled. Consequently Intelligence had bet on one plane arriving safely, rather than distribute the secrets among the five.
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