Bomber Pilot

by Philip Ardery

  Through patchy rain and cloud we crossed Ireland and approached Scotland. The weather was warmer over the land, but patches of cloud were thicker and steamier. We came in to our designated field at Prestwick, Scotland, in a heavy downpour of rain, but by the time we had taxied to the place where the tower operator directed us, it had cleared considerably. One of our first vivid impressions that we were far from home came from our headsets and the theatrical voice of the tower operator. His replies to our queries about where to park were packed with such words as “aihcrahft,” “roight chew ahh,” and “straight away, cawn't miss it.”

  After we parked we walked to a building where it appeared we were supposed to check in. Before we reached it there were a half-dozen pink-cheeked children who surrounded us. “Ya ga ahnie goom, Yahnk? Ahnie Ameddican kahndie?” We had goom and kahndie, but we didn't have it long.

  For our quarters we had a beautiful old brick house, large, ivied, and rambling, which looked almost like a converted castle. Rhododendron bloomed in profusion in clumps scattered over the well-kept lawn. The place was lovely, the meals were terrible, the beer like brackish water, and the people most cordial and kind.

  That night McLaughlin, bombardier of the crew, who was Scotsman enough to effect a great burr, held the limelight uncontested with a matchless set of stories. Mac had knocked around New York City most of his life in a variety of jobs, among them bartending in Greenwich Village for a year or so, and he really knew the underside of big city life. The enlisted men of my crew, Sergeants Dalton, Hoff, Kase, Mix, Smith, and Wilson, were on a par with the officers. It was an extremely competent and compact unit trained in a style prescribed by the soft-voiced, good-looking Texas Pete Hughes.

  The next morning we reported to operations to find that we were leaving immediately for our new base. There were a few other airplanes, B-17s, which had come in destined for other stations in England near ours. They would join in a formation with us and we would be led by a navigator of the Air Transport Command to our permanently assigned bases. In England, it was said, navigation was difficult until one became accustomed to it. There were so many airdromes it was very confusing, and there were cases of crews getting lost within a few miles of home base. There is such a sameness to the country that the checkpoints generally used for navigation have little individuality. Each might look a lot like any one of a hundred others scattered all over England. Under you there may have been a town with three railroads leading in from the north and only two rail lines going out to the south. The map might show five towns which looked like that. We heard that when the crews were properly trained on navigation in England, the various radio aids to navigation would make it a cinch in any kind of weather. Naturally it would take some time for training before we would know how to use these aids properly.

  We flew down the west coast for a while and then headed straight across the island and in a very short time reached our base. That was the first of many surprises I got about the size of England. I never got used to its being a little island so small that we could fly over all of it in an afternoon—at least, nearly all of it. It looked like a broad expanse of beautiful country, much of it quite similar to the horse country of Kentucky. There were seemingly hundreds of airdromes, some cleverly camouflaged so that we were right over them before we saw there was anything under us but open country.

  The CO and a few members of the group staff had preceded us traveling by Air Transport Command, so we expected to be met by at least one or two familiar faces at our new base. When we flew over the airport that was to be our home, the lead navigator called us on the radio and told us that was it. We peeled out of formation and circled the drome to get a look at it. It was a clear, beautiful day, and to the north we could see the town of Norwich squatting underneath a lazy flock of barrage balloons. In our headsets we could hear the squeakers of the balloons—radio transmitters sending out warning signals that in one's headphones sounded very much like air raid sirens signaling an alert. I imagined the noise could be terrifying to one lost in bad weather. What might it be like to listen to the screaming of these things when you couldn't see but a few hundred yards ahead? I hoped that the proximity of our field to the town would not result in our ships plowing through the wall of cables in bad weather.

  We called the tower and a British voice gave us permission to land. Hard to understand those people over the radio! And they never seemed to be able to hear us properly, so that it frequently bogged down into a process of each asking the other to repeat his last message. As our plane rolled to a stop at the end of the runway there was a jeep to lead us to the place where I could park. I taxied out some distance to a dispersal area, turned the ship around on a concrete circular emplacement which we called a hard stand, faced it back towards the taxi strip, and cut the engines. Just as the four props slowed to a stop, another jeep pulled up. Captain John Brooks was in it. He had come ahead with Colonel Wood to help in preparing things for our arrival, and I welcomed him.

  “Where are the rest of them?” he shouted.

  “Back in Maine,” I replied. “I'll bet you don't see the next one in here for at least two days.”

  I was right. It was three days before the next ship came in. It happened that those behind us hit bad weather, which delayed them. While we were waiting for the rest of the crews, I enjoyed relaxing and looking around. I managed to draw a bicycle from the supply office. The base was so spread out it was difficult to get around without a jeep or a bike. The English summer was at its height, though it never really got warm enough according to my idea of summer. The air was fresh and cool, like a day of spring at home, and the woods which were scattered all over our airdrome were beautiful. Through the woods small lanes were cut leading to the various living sites. I found in those first days in England many of the acquaintances of my early years: there were rooks and jackdaws flying overhead, and grouse, plover, and pheasants in great numbers just off the runways.

  The second afternoon I was in England I rode my bike into the small village of Wymondham (pronounced Windum) near the field and was impressed by its picturesqueness. The lane leading into the village was narrow and winding, with hedgerows on either side and well-kept fields over the hedgerows. There were haystacks in the fields that were so perfectly formed they looked like loaves of gingerbread.

  On the edge of the village was a little pond with ducks on it. Farther on the streets were narrow with brick buildings almost to the edge of the pavement; they seemed particularly incongruous when an occasional tremendous American Army truck lumbered through. At the far end of the town was a very old church that looked like it might have been started as a Stonehenge in pagan times, and continued having parts added down through successive ages of Christianity. The whole scene had a kind of beauty strange to me.

  When I returned to the base in the late evening I went to the bar of what would be our officers’ club. Our base had been an RAF station, and there were several officers of His Majesty's service still lingering around. They were there with a few American airmen of a veteran group waiting to give our fellows some combat instructions and had grouped themselves congenially around the bar. With mugs of incredibly insipid English beer in their hands, they proceeded to make the rafters shake. They seemed to know only one song:

  Oh, they say there's a troop ship just leaving Bombay

  Bound for Old Blighty's shore

  Heavily laden with time-expired men,

  Bound for the land they adore.

  And there's many an airman just finished his tour,

  And many a twirp signing on—

  There'll be no promotions this side of the ocean

  So cheer up my lads, bless ’em all!

  Bless ’em all. Bless ’em all. The long and the short and the tall.

  There'll be no promotions this side of the ocean,

  So cheer up my lads, bless ’em all.

  On and on it went, till when it stopped nobody knew. This, I thought, is just as it should be—sort
of Hell's Angels setting modernized for the latest war.

  In the twilight of that evening almost at midnight we heard a low throb begin in the sky above and grow to a mighty crescendo. In the bar when the sound began the song stopped a moment. We listened and someone said, “The RAF's out again. God bless ‘em.” I walked outside to see, but against the darkening sky the big black airplanes, Halifaxes and Lancasters, scarcely showed up at all. They were evidently going over at medium altitude, and they flew in a peculiar manner not at all like our formations. Still it was a discernible pattern with distances of about half a mile between airplanes. Sometimes I could pick out a ship, but not many. I felt intense gratitude to these hardy lads going out just as we were having a final beer before going to bed. They were fighting a tough war and had been for a long time. Theirs was a beautiful country and one could understand their determination to defend it. Just at dawn the next morning when I heard the first squawk out of our loudspeaker system to wake me up, I heard the RAF boys coming back, some with engines sputtering. A few of them, I discovered later in the day, landed at our base. They had been unable to make it to their bases farther inland. Our Air Force was in its infancy in England at that time, and I couldn't help wondering how it would stack up against the RAF when it had had a chance to grow a little.

  Several days later I got word that we might expect five or six ships in from Scotland, and suddenly in the sky we saw a formation. Sure enough it was headed our way. I got on my bike and pedaled the road from the operations building to the central control tower in the middle of the field. Several of the ships were not of my squadron. But my men Fowble and Blackis had brought in their planes and crews. Blackie was a keen little Greek from New Kensington, Pennsylvania. He was in my A Flight commanded by Lieutenant Ben Walsh. I was awfully glad to see him and Fowble and as soon as I was sure who it was I biked over to the supply office to get bicycles for them. There weren't many bicycles, and with the ships coming in I knew soon they would all be gone. I didn't want my boys to be walking while the men of other squadrons rode. It was a real holiday when the ships came in. I enjoyed taking the men to their living sites and doing what I could to see that they got such comforts as were to be had. There was much talk on these reunions of narrow escapes, weather flying, major and minor incidents built up into great escapades, and Fowble and Blackie certainly had their share.

  On successive days after that, the crews arrived by threes and fours. Gradually the “Ardery Squadron,” as censorship designated my unit, rounded itself out. A Flight was complete with Ben Walsh, Blackie, and McLaughlin. B Flight, headed by Captain Frank Ellis, came along with Duane Lighter, and shy red-headed Smitty. Smitty, another Texan from Fort Worth, had paid me the rare compliment of asking me to be the best man at his wedding and I would not forget that. And of course there was the famous C Flight, Ed Fowble, Pete Hughes, and Bob Wright. We were again a fighting unit and as great a squadron as could be without combat experience.

  Combat school consisted of lectures by pilots who had completed combat tours in the theater and were about to be sent home. There were a couple of pilots among our instructors who had been in the combat zone a long time but had quit flying combat. One of these fellows I picked as a coward by a lot of the boastful, outrageous things he said. I questioned some of his colleagues and found my supposition to be true. I felt it would have been better to let the school go without lectures than to have these grounded pilots making such comments. Eventually our group commander, Colonel Wood, heard about the cases and had the instructors withdrawn and we heard no more of them. The remainder of the pilots who were instructing us did a great job. They had been in one of the first two B-24 groups to hit the European theater and were a part of the famous Ted's Flying Circus. That name was applied to a group of heavy bombers which, with another Eighth Air Force Lib group, had been temporarily detached from the Eighth Air Force to fight the Battle of Africa with the Ninth Bomber Command. The long range and weight-carrying capacity of Liberators at slightly lower altitudes made them the answer to the needs of the Africa campaign. These groups did great service in Africa after El Alamein in the late summer of 1942, when the British were driving Rommel back to his final stand. That was just about a year before our arrival in the combat zone.

  Later on these Liberator groups were brought back to England. There they had had a tough time bucking the vastly superior numbers of B-17s. Plans for all the missions were more or less based on the Fortress—an inevitable factor as a result of the small number of Liberators compared to the Forts. The different flight characteristics of the airplanes frequently were disadvantageous to the Libs, so that Fortress men were heard to say they didn't care whether they had friendly fighter support on missions as long as the B-24s went along. If the B-24s went they would draw all the Nazi fighter attacks, and the protection to the Forts would be as good as if they had fighter cover. Of course, such comments were pure propaganda, and we knew it. The main difference of superiority between airplanes was one of numbers, but wherever there are Americans in such circumstances there must be intense rivalry.

  During this time Don Buck and I were busy setting up a squadron operations office. The rest of the guys helped out here and there to make up for the fact that our ground echelon had not arrived. They were coming by boat and were expected to land soon. The ground training of the combat school lasted only a few days and after that we immediately started flying training. During those days we heard thousands of rumors. The main one was that we weren't going to stay in England. One puzzling part of the training was that we were practicing flying formation at extremely low altitude. No one ever flew low altitude formation in heavy bombers in daylight over Europe. What could this mean?

  I flew nearly all the practice missions, but one day when my administrative duties kept me on the ground, the boys were out flying and I noticed a lone bomber circling the field. It made a long, careful approach as though something were the matter. I wheeled my bike over to the tower as fast as I could and arrived just in time to catch a glimpse of the big ship slowing up its roll at the end of the runway as it turned off on a taxi strip. The tail section swayed peculiarly, and there painted on the tail I could see the large letter I for Item—Ed Fowble's ship. It was taxiing in the direction of the subdepot shops and I followed.

  When it finally came to a stop, I came alongside. A huge hole had been torn in the main tail section, leaving one vertical stabilizer hanging by a shred of metal. The whole tail of the ship wobbled even as it stopped, for it was almost cut through. The bomb doors opened and out stepped Fowble and his engineer, Sergeant Le Jeune; both were livid.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Ed's lips worked a couple of times without saying anything. Then he said: “We were flying a very tight formation watching our lead ship when all of a sudden another ship in the low left element pulled up under us without any warning whatever. Some of the fellows in the back of our plane had reported his weaving in and out. Evidently he was trying to fly closer than he comfortably could and when he pulled up, his number four prop got our left vertical stabilizer and cut almost all the way through. Maybe both his right hand props hit us because after the collision he nosed down and pulled off to the left and I could see his number three and four props fly off and go spinning down. He evidently tried to pick the first place he could to set the ship down. It went in near the edge of an airdrome in fairly flat ground, but it was a combination of a crash landing and a flat crackup.” His lips trembled as he spoke, but his voice was steady. It turned out there was luckily only a skeleton crew aboard the other airplane. The pilot received only bruises; one officer was killed and another very seriously injured with compound fractures and other complications. The rest got out with only minor injuries.

  In a way I was sorry about Ed. This episode probably calmed him down to the point where he lived longer in combat than he would have otherwise. But after that he never again showed the puppy-like enthusiasm so characteristic of him in the beginning
. He had always been one to plague Murph, our engineering officer, in order to get new gadgets fitted to his airplane. Ed had had more stuff put on his ship than anyone else in the squadron, chiefly because he had taken a more personal interest in it. Now it was apparent the question was whether the ship would be worth repairing.

  The next day or two brought forth the decision that I for Item would not be repaired. Her wounds were mortal, and immediately began the process of stripping her of badly needed parts. Our technical supply was almost empty of spare parts in those days and a wrecked ship was likely to be picked clean of everything salvageable within a matter of a few hours after it cracked up. Every time a nose wheel tire, or a wing light, or a flight indicator was removed from his ship it cut Ed's heart out. I hurt for him! An old battle-weary Liberator with the name Eager Beaver painted on its nose came in and was assigned to Fowble's crew to replace I for Item. It had to have lots of work done on it. In the waist section of the Beaver you could see light through hundreds of small holes where bits of flak had let the sun in. Ed tried hard to be satisfied but in his heart, as in mine, there was a definite feeling that it was a turkey.

  Quite suddenly we received news that the group was going out to Africa. We would be going along with the two more experienced Liberator groups, which had been there before. This time it would be a larger and much better equipped Ted's Flying Circus which would go ripping at the Axis's soft underbelly. I was pleased to be included in the Flying Circus. Colonel Ted Timberlake, for whom this small air task force was named, had been a group commander, but now he was in command of this wing composed of the first three groups of Libs to be sent to the Eighth Air Force. Ours was the third group.

  I had got in a new crew to be assigned to my squadron. The pilot was Lieutenant Andy Opsata. I planned to fly to Africa with him because I had had no chance to look over his crew carefully and I thought this the logical opportunity to become acquainted. Fowble's Eager Beaver was the only ship of my squadron left behind, but we expected it to follow as soon as it was put in shape. Andy Opsata was a quiet, blond fellow who looked more like an altar boy than a heavy bomber pilot. I could see at once he was a very good man and I was glad to get him. I committed the same indignity with him as I had with Pete Hughes: I took over the first pilot's seat for the flight to Africa.