Dear Dad & Mom,
I am writing you just before I get ready to leave the States. This is one thing I would rather not have to write you both. I know how you feel about me. All I can say to that is I feel the same way about you. Ever since I can remember you were always swell parents. You gave me every chance to make something of myself. I have no kick coming.
I am about to go overseas. I knew it was coming a long time ago. It’s something I have been training a long time for. I think I have a darn good chance to see this thing through & come back to you all safe & sound. My biggest worry is your worrying about me. Please don’t. You don’t have to.
You will see nothing is going to happen to me. If I knew you won’t carry on, I would feel so much better. All I ask of you, Dad, is take good care of mom & Seymour. I guess you know what I mean. I don’t want to write any more on the subject. Just tell mom not to worry & everything will come out ok. From what I heard today, I am going to a place I want to. It looks like it will be China. I will fly all the way. I am glad it won’t be by boat.
There will be times you won’t get mail from me. Don’t worry. It will have to take a longer time to get to you now. So try & understand above everything don’t worry about me. That’s about all I can say for now.
Just take good care of mom for me.
All my love to you.
Artie11
Rose tucked the letter into her apron pocket and closed her eyes. Arthur’s bravado conjuring a slight smile for an instant, she silently prayed for Arthur’s return, as she made Seymour do every morning and evening. She not only worried about Arthur, but also about Seymour and Esther. They, too, saw the newspapers filled with grim news of massive battles and losses in Europe and the Pacific.
Rose got up from the chair, picked up the cloth, and began to dust again.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
After logging a scant forty-eight hours and thirty minutes in the air aboard B-24s, Arthur flew aboard a C-47 transport plane to Morrison Army Air Field, in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 11, 1943. Every pilot and airman knew what the assignment meant: They were shipping out for combat. With the highest casualty rate of any branch, the Army Air Corps had no choice but to rush pilots and airmen into action.
At Morrison, thousands of air personnel were assembled for their overseas dispositions by the U.S. Army Air Forces Ferrying Command. The more fortunate bomber pilots and crews flew out to Europe or the Pacific on new bombers; when B-24s or B-17s fresh from the factories were not available, thousands of pilots and airmen were crammed aboard troop transports or converted passenger ships. Eighth and 15th Air Force crews headed to England or Italy would spend two to three weeks in storm-tossed Atlantic waters where Nazi U-Boats prowled the convoy routes. Some of the vessels leaving Palm Beach never made it more than a few miles from Florida before German torpedoes sent them to the ocean bottom. The grim gibe was that if a ship lumbered straight out of Palm Beach Harbor and kept going straight, “you were heading into U-Boat Country, so kiss your ass good-bye.” 12
To Arthur’s relief, he and his crewmates would not make the Atlantic crossing by ship. They had been ordered to fly out to war on a new B-24 named Maid of Tin. They would not know their destination until they were in the air, and they opened a sealed envelope.
Arthur and the other men of the 715th were rousted from bed at 3 a.m. on November 19, 1943, and told by an orderly that they were to ship out aboard Maid of Tin, with all their gear. Before climbing into the bomber with fourteen other men of the 715th, including two pilots, Arthur headed to a 5 a.m. briefing. William Blum, a pilot in the squadron, wrote: “It was still dark and very humid when we were told to report . . . the briefing room was crowded and we were all conscious of the long flight before us. The briefing was short, a roll call of the crews scheduled to take off, the order to take off, photographs of landing fields along the route, a detailed account of all landmarks and aids to navigation, emergency ditching procedure, and finally a thorough weather briefing.” 13
After a quick breakfast at the mess, Arthur and the others flying out boarded jeeps to the bombers lined up on the airstrip. Blum recalled that “everyone gathered for a last cigarette in our homeland before the big hop.” 14
A few days earlier at the Morrison processing center, Arthur had been required to make out a will and was given a quick medical examination. He named his mother, Rose, as the beneficiary of the $10,000 government death insurance accorded to the men of the 8th Army Air Corps.
When Maid of Tin, laden with 2,500 gallons of gas, soared above the airstrip and headed southwest through drizzling rain and a low cloud cover toward Puerto Rico, the pilot turned over the controls to the copilot. The skipper then reached into his flight jacket and removed a sealed envelope marked SECRET in bold type, and switched on the intercom.
“Men,” he intoned, “I’m about to inform you of our destination.”
As every crewman fell silent, the sound of the pilot tearing open the envelope could be heard faintly above the drone of the engines.
The pilot said, “Your destination—the British Isles.”
Blum’s words echoed the thoughts of Arthur: “No one said a word. We all had hoped for a tour of China. The British winters meant bad weather and the Jerries were hot pilots.” 15
The South Atlantic Crossing to Great Britain took nearly two weeks, with Maid of Tin making required fueling stops and layovers at Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Brazil, and Dakar and Marrakesh, both in North Africa. From there, the B-24 landed at Seething Airfield, Station 146, on December 3, 1943.
When Arthur first set foot at Seething on December 3, 1943, he was uncertain about what to expect. As a jeep wove across frozen mud and rutted paths to rows of barracks, several airmen waved. “You’ll be sorry!” a few shouted.
Another crewman bellowed, “Here comes the fresh meat!” 16
Not exactly a reassuring welcome, Arthur thought. He later learned that both greetings were an 8th Air Force tradition for arriving crews.
Arthur and his comrades were soon dropped off at their new home, the 715th’s aluminum Nissen hut, whose uninsulated, tarpaper-covered walls housed rows of thin-mattressed cots with only three feet separating them. The reek of the coal-fired stoves that supplied warmth against the English chill merged with cigarette smoke and the odor of wet woolen blankets and uniforms. As Arthur would soon learn, those smells seemed more fragrant to airmen each time they survived another mission and returned to Seething.
Before he could fly out on an actual mission, nearly three weeks in Seething “lecture rooms for precombat orientation and theater indoctrination” awaited. The collective eyes of Arthur’s fellow rookie crewmen and pilots often glazed over from their instructors’ long-winded sermons and their exhortations that no mission was ever a “milk run,” a bombing run in which there was little or no flak or enemy fighter planes. Arthur and other city boys stifled laughter as young men from rural spots stared wide-eyed when lecturers sternly pontificated about venereal disease and “loose women” around the British airfields where the rookies would be based.
There was one lecture that proved different for Arthur, as well as the other rookie airman. He heard the harsh warning about the odds against pilots and airmen surviving the required twenty-five missions over Hitler’s Europe: “On an average, the 8th Air Force loses four out of every hundred planes on every mission . . . Of course, some missions will be a disaster due to very aggressive enemy action.”
This being the case, the instructor reasoned, “A crew that flies twenty-five missions has almost a hundred percent chance of being shot down by its last mission.” 17
Arthur and the others sat utterly silent. It hit them full force that, in all likelihood, many of them would never see home again.
Unlike some airmen, Arthur had already prepared himself for that grim possibility. Before leaving for war, he had told his younger brothe
r, Seymour, “If I’m going to die, I’d rather fly. I don’t want to die on the ground.” 18
As he had told his brother, neither the eye injury nor anything else was going to stop him from fighting the Nazis. He was willing to die for his country, and as part of a B-24 crew, he knew and accepted that he was likely to do just that. Still, saying it and having air-combat veterans tell it were two different things. The reality first riveted and then haunted B-24 and B-17 bomber crews, and Arthur proved no exception.
Now, less than a month since he had made the long, harrowing flight from Florida to England aboard Maid of Tin, that harsh reality hit him. It had begun moments after he had been pulled out of bed at 3 a.m. and had swelled by the time the preflight briefing ended. To fill out crews slated to fly a mission but shorthanded by casualties, squadron leaders routinely drafted pilots and airmen who were supposed to have a “day off.” Arthur fully understood the necessity. What he could not quite shake was Colonel Thompson’s grim visage at the briefing. Thompson had laid it out bluntly and candidly: the mission ahead would be the last for many of the crews flying out in a few hours. From the moment that the colonel had concluded the briefing with the words “kick their asses,” Arthur’s stomach had been churning. 19
It had gotten even worse after he stepped into the mess hall for 5:30 a.m. breakfast, right after the briefing. He only picked at the scrambled eggs, ham, sausage, and toast that cooks piled onto the airmen’s tin trenchers. Everyone in the mess hall could tell who was flying out that day and who was off duty. Men who downed endless mugs of coffee and ate little or nothing had just come out of the briefing room. They also toted thermoses of coffee to help ward off the fifty-below-zero temperature of a B-24’s cabin at twenty-eight thousand feet above the ground.
As Arthur reached the bomber he saluted the pilot, Second Lieutenant Philip Chase, and the copilot, Second Lieutenant William H. Thomas. A couple of cocky college boys, he thought, but decent enough guys. Still, he had no doubt that he would have been better in the pilot’s seat than either of them.
He stopped near the front of the bomber, slowly running his fingers across the fuselage’s cold steel skin and the colorfully painted image of a buxom pinup girl clad in a white bikini top and grass skirt cradling a bomb—her Harmful Lil Armful. For the second time before flying into combat, he inspected a B-24’s 67-foot 8-inch length, its 110-foot wingspan, and its four powerful Pratt & Whitney R-1830 turbo-supercharged radial engines, 1,200 horsepower each. German flak and fighter planes had rocked both his plane and his “rookie” nerves aboard Consolidated Mess on December 24, but at least now he knew what to expect over France.
As he began his inspection, he grew concerned by the pounding Harmful Lil Armful had taken from antiaircraft fire on her third mission, the previous day, December 30. He was wary of the chance that any damage to the aircraft less than a day earlier might not be fully repaired. He did not have to remind himself to pay special attention to the bomber’s engines.
From talking with other engineers, he had learned that the B-24 Liberator could not match the B-17 Flying Fortress’s capacity to endure heavy damage and that crews had dubbed the B-24 the “Flying Coffin” because it possessed only two exits. The escape hatch was located near the tail of the aircraft, and a fire anywhere in front of the exit could trap the crew. The only other escape was the bomb bay, whose doors often jammed from flak’s concussive waves.
The aircraft was highly susceptible to fires as well. Luftwaffe fighter pilots had learned to rake several fuel tanks mounted in the B-24’s upper fuselage with machine-gun and nose-cannon rounds and set the bomber ablaze. Once the flames spread, the B-24’s gravest flaw appeared, as the wings would often buckle and crumple. On his first mission, Arthur had witnessed several doomed B-24s plunging past his bomber, their flaming wings folded upward like fiery butterflies.
As Arthur and his fellow engineers and mechanics continued their preflight inspections, some crewmen tossed footballs in the semidarkness between the planes and on the fields’ edges; other airmen hurled baseballs, the staccato slaps of horsehide into leather gloves toted from all corners of America a poignant reminder of home, of better days. Cigarettes glowed everywhere.
Dozens of trucks packed with massive five-hundred-pound bombs lumbered up to the planes surrounding the runways. The bombardier of each crew would arm the bombs with detonation pins once the B-24s neared their French targets. Other trucks laden with steel containers that held gleaming .50-caliber machine-gun belts surrounded eighteen bombers arrayed along Seething’s three runways.
Arthur worked his way around the plane, meticulously going over each of his checkpoints twice while the rest of Harmful Lil Armful’s crew arrived in the back of an open truck. They clambered out and huddled around the bomber. When he finished his inspection of engines one and two and emerged from beneath the left wing, he spied Staff Sergeant Thomas M. McNamara, a veteran of four missions already and an older-brother figure to several of the younger crewmen. McNamara’s hand rested on the shoulder of nineteen-year-old Staff Sergeant William D. Dunham, an Ohio farm boy whose gaunt face was creased with worry.
Arthur stopped and nodded at them. Although Harmful Lil Armful’s crew was not his own, Arthur had spent a lot of time at Seething with McNamara. A square-jawed, wide-shouldered, Irish New Yorker with a raucous, infectious laugh, he regaled his crewmates with a bottomless font of hilarious stories from his tough upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen to his family’s move to Grand Rapids, Michigan. McNamara knew every inch of the B-24 and B-17 alike. Before enlisting in the Army Air Force, he had worked in Henry Ford’s B-24 plant in Willow Run, Michigan.
Whether he was in the freezing barracks where the six crews of the 715th Bomber Squad slept, the mess hall, or the briefing room, McNamara’s confidence and experience always reassured his own crew and other airmen in the unit. Even the pilots sought his counsel when it came to the literal nuts-and-bolts workings of the bombers.
At the sudden backfire of a truck’s tailpipe or perhaps even a firecracker, since it was, after all, the final day of 1943, Dunham stiffened and cursed softly, his eyes wide. “He’s just nervous,” McNamara assured Arthur.
“He’ll be fine,” he added with a smile.
Arthur smiled at the two men, walked over to the other wing, and crouched beneath the number three engine. All around the plane, other crew members were making their own preflight checks. Navigator and second lieutenant Harry K. Farrell and bombardier and flight officer Edward E. George, a pair of Ivy Leaguers with the innate confidence of their upper-class pedigrees, quietly conversed and looked up to say hello to Arthur. Despite the difference in their background from the rest of the crewmen, they were, as McNamara said, “good eggs.”
Radio operator Staff Sergeant Joseph Defranze, a wavy-haired, gregarious nineteen-year-old kid from Hyde Park, Massachusetts, grinned at Arthur. “Make sure we’ve got all four propellers,” he joked.
Arthur retorted, “Colonel Thompson told me we only need one.”
Tail gunner and staff sergeant Howard R. Peck, who said little but had proven a deadly marksman with his .50-caliber Browning on his first two missions, chuckled.
Arthur barely heard the laughter. He had already spied several large dents from German flak that had bent parts of the engine’s casing close to the propeller—too close for his liking. There were at least a dozen holes in the casing and the underside of the wing from where Messerschmitt 109 fighters’ machine guns and nose cannons had found their mark. Knowing how vulnerable the B-24’s wings were, Arthur rushed over to the two pilots.
Saluting, he explained the damage he had found. “Sir,” he said to Lieutenant Chase, “the ship is unfit to fly—the engine needs to be fixed.”
For a moment, Chase and Thomas stared at him. Then Chase’s angular features tightened, and he glowered at Arthur. “This is a milk run—quick and simple, Meyerowitz. She’ll get repaired when we get back.”
The pilot started to turn his back to Arthur.
Arthur understood Chase’s thinking: Every flight brought them closer to the magic number of twenty-five. They wanted to fly.
Any mission was dangerous even without a damaged engine. Still, it was the flight engineer’s duty to raise the alarm if a bomber was too damaged. Chase and Thomas, like all B-24 and B-17 pilots, had been taught, as B-24 pilot William E. Carigan Jr., recalled, that “the flight engineer, with his wide knowledge of the plane, must always get your ear, and any warning he gives must be seriously considered.” 20
“Lieutenant Chase,” Arthur said.
Chase wheeled around, scowling again. Thomas’s stocky shoulders tensed, and he shook his head, his thin lips clenching.
“The repairs shouldn’t take more than a day.”
“That’s enough, Sergeant,” Chase snapped.
Arthur knew he should shut up now before risking a charge of insubordination to a superior. He could not do so. He knew what he had seen. If he were the pilot, he would never endanger his men like that.
“Fix the ship!” he shouted before he even realized the words came out of his mouth.
Chase’s blue eyes narrowed. “You’re not the pilot, and you’re not in charge. Harmful Lil Armful will fly today with the engine as is.” 21
Arthur slammed his clipboard to the ground, turned his back to the two pilots, and joined his staring crewmates. From behind him, neither Chase nor Thomas said a word.
CHAPTER 2
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PURPLE HEART CORNER
Piercing the gloomy gray skies above Seething at 8:15 a.m., the roar of eighteen B-24s’ engines could be heard ten miles away in Norwich. At full strength, the 448th Bomb Group’s four squadrons had once stood at sixty-four Liberators, but German flak and fighters had thinned Colonel Thompson’s command to forty-eight, with thirty undergoing repairs. If Lieutenant Chase had heeded Arthur’s warning about Harmful Lil Armful’s damaged number three engine, that number would have been thirty-one. Arthur and the other men in the B-24s taxiing onto all three runways knew that some would not return from today’s mission and silently prayed that their “number was not up.”
The Lost Airman Page 3