A typical personality of Alexandria, as the place where currents of humanity meet, was a telephone operator in the Cecil Hotel. She whipped back and forth in seven different languages, handling all of them perfectly and saying usually little more than a word or two in one before switching to the next. I stood in the lobby and listened in stunned amazement to her performance. I always wanted to be polylingual.
After three days in Alexandria we returned to Bengasi. We ran right into a Hollywood performance scheduled for showing at our base. It was starring Jack Benny, Winni Shaw, Anna Lee, Larry Adler, and others. The show was terrific, particularly Jack Benny. It afforded us diversion for days mulling over the gags. I have heard much discussion since that time about Hollywood celebrities taking the line of least resistance in entertaining troops in the field. These certainly didn't. Their performance was superb in spite of the fact that they all looked worn out from their travels, dysentery, and the usual miseries of the Middle East.
After we bombed Wiener Neustadt everyone in the group was impatient to go back to England. A lot of the guys were sick. Nearly everyone but me had had dysentery at least once, and a rough case of dysentery leaves the stomach and intestines in a very delicate state for a very long time. All of us had lost weight and seemed to have less resistance than when we arrived. I think I fared as well as I did physically because towards the last of our stay in the desert my meals consisted of practically nothing but white bread and water. It wasn't that I liked bread but it was about the only clean thing we had to eat, and the rest of the stuff was certainly no more palatable than bread. Bread seemed to agree with me better than the average diet did the others, and so I crammed myself with it.
The last of my combat flying in the Middle East occurred when I led the group on a mission to one of the Italian airfields at Foggia. One day shortly after, the long-awaited order to move came in. We packed with great haste and departed for Marrakesh in French Morocco, where we spent part of the night. About midnight we took off for England. We were supposed to be flying a rather loose formation until it got light enough to see well; then if we had kept together well enough we planned to stack into a close formation flight the rest of the way. There was one hitch—the existence of a front off the Spanish coast that was accompanied by some pretty rough weather.
We took off on schedule and followed the plan almost exactly during the early part of the flight. We met the bad weather sometime after daylight, just as we were briefed to expect. I had the Lincolnesque Frank Ellis flying the right wing position on the ship that Fowble and I were in, and he was flying so close that I was a little nervous. I had had much to criticize about Ellis's formation flying and had taken him out of leading flights and set him to flying wing position on combat missions in spite of the fact that he was a flight commander, a captain, and in many ways an extremely capable officer. He was angry about it, but in a short time he became quite proficient in flying wing position. Now he was flying too close. After all, we had many hours to fly and he certainly didn't want to work himself to death on this trip. Then we began to hit weather.
It thickened and thickened. We hit patches of rain. Most of the clouds seemed to be low, and so we began to climb. We couldn't go on oxygen because we had more men aboard than there were oxygen masks. There was little we could do except go on instruments and fly through the stuff. I was in the pilot seat and Ed Fowble, for a change, was riding copilot. My friend Sollie down in the nose compartment kept shouting at me to hold a better heading. I wouldn't answer him over the interphone, for I think he thought Ed was flying. I would get four or five degrees off course and take my time about coming back to the proper heading. That made Sollie extremely angry. Sollie was from Brooklyn, and Ed and I got a lot of laughs out of hearing him shout and swear over the interphone in Brooklynese. I finally settled down to doing a good job of instrument flying such as he was used to.
After a few hours of flight through the weather in which I was on instruments about half the time, except for some clearing spots, we broke out on the other side. We looked around to find only one airplane with us. It was the indomitable Frank Ellis. After a short flight through clear weather we landed at one of the fields near Newquay in Cornwall. We waited several hours for the other ships to come in and then realized there were some that failed to make it through the front. They were, I thought, doubtless in Lisbon. We were told in case of emergency we might go in there, but if we did we would be interned. One of the ships, that of Lieutenant Lighter of my A Flight, we heard giving calls indicating engine trouble and heading for Portugal. That was the last we ever heard of that crew.
How wonderful England looked to us that day. From the first glimpse I got of the spray-washed coast of Cornwall coming in, to the last of the countryside I saw flying across England to our base next day, it was lovely England. And though the dust of the Middle Eastern desert was in our ships and would be for some time, the effect of the desert was quickly out of mind. I hated everything about Bengasi except for the swims in the Mediterranean, and I cheerfully welcomed a theater of operations where the living was a little easier, even if the missions were generally tougher. The airplanes were all given a complete bath inside and out. Dead grasshoppers by the thousands were washed out along with a few dozen scorpions in a current of Middle Eastern mud, now to be mixed with the soil that “is forever England.”
We found our base little changed from the way it was when we left it. The ground echelon of the squadrons had come in, and the servicing of our unit was much better than it had been before our departure. Almost overnight we were one again with those who hadn't been to Africa. For some time the boys who were left behind got pretty tired of hearing about all we had done in the desert. I know my engineering section showed the effect of it. My prized engineering officer Murph told me one time that he hoped his crew chiefs wouldn't have to hear too much more about what we were able to do in the line of maintenance in Africa with our extremely abbreviated maintenance section. Murph was a wise man. I took the hint and put out the word to the pilots to calm down in dealing with their newly reacquired ground crews. These men had been left in England to do nothing but be on KP and cleanup details while we were off to Africa being glamorized. There wasn't one of them who wouldn't have given a lot to be with us and endure all the hardships, to be able to crew his own airplane. I had a deep feeling of gratitude toward the ground crewmen of my squadron, as I'm sure most squadron COs had. For them there was little but bitter, rugged work—not glamorous, but indispensable.
When I arrived in England I heard rumors that my recommendation for promotion to the rank of major had gone in again. There were indications that this time it would go through. And sure enough about a week after I arrived at the old base it did come through. I had been the “junior squadron commander” for a long time—too long! Now I was no longer the junior. Captain Conroy, who succeeded Hank Yaeger, was the new junior.
From captain to major seemed quite a jump to me. Most civilians don't see the distinctions between the grades with the clear perspective that the military sees them. Officers up to and including the rank of captain are called “company grade” and are generally classed as “junior officers.” From major to include full colonel they are “field grade” and “senior officers.” The distinction applies frequently at officers’ messes. It also applied frequently when orders came through requiring an officer to take a certain important assignment—so often the directive would say the officer selected must be “of field grade.” I had held down a job for a long time that authorized me to be of field grade, and there had been times when the fact that I was not pained me. Indeed I thought I had bridged quite a military gap in this advancement and I also appreciated the increase in pay. There was an addition of about a hundred dollars a month that Anne and my son Peter could well use.
My pride in the squadron swelled mightily. I had come back to England with a much more sympathetic and tolerant attitude than I had when I left. I discovered it was only important
that we fly the way we were supposed to and put our bombs on the target in order to bring about the greatest damage to the enemy. Discipline is a large part of this and smart appearance may have a little to do with it. But if a heavy bomber squadron is to reach anything like its humanly possible maximum in bombing efficiency, it must shortcut a lot of niceties. And when men are tired from continued physical exertion and mental strain, a CO must be able to gauge accurately the limits obtainable from them in matters of secondary importance. I felt in my men a strong response to those changes in me. Their response was a spirit of loyalty that made me happier than anything I had experienced in my military life.
The ability of my lead crews was being increasingly recognized in group headquarters. The way we bombed, with all ships dropping bombs on the leader, required special emphasis on training and proficiency of lead crews. Fowble's crew was recognized as one of the very best in the group. Ellis had started out slowly but was coming along fast now, as was Wright. I did everything I could to sell these crews in group headquarters so as to give my squadron more opportunities to lead the group. In the beginning of our operational work my squadron was low in its number of leads. Now it was at the top by a wide margin.
For the first few weeks after we got back to England we got little experience in operational work over Europe. I made one uneventful raid on an airfield in France. We came back just as it got dark and got jumped by fighters as we left the enemy coast. Their attacks didn't seem very determined, though it was a wonder they didn't follow us right back to our bases in the darkening afternoon and hit us while we were in the traffic pattern. That did happen once later, and it showed us what damage could be done at that particularly vulnerable moment.
It was then the second week in September of 1943 and General Mark Clark had made his landing at Salerno. He was hard put to hold his beachhead and every available bit of air power was called to assist him. It was not much of a surprise to us that Ted's Flying Circus, famous for its ability to move into a new position efficiently and quickly, would have to meet this call. I hadn't got used to being back in England in these two weeks or so we had been there and I didn't want to go to Africa again, but here was an assigned task and that was all there was to it. We were supposed to be going down to operate for a period of from two weeks to a month to bolster the Fifteenth Air Force. How long we would actually be gone was a matter we knew we had better not count on. This time we would go to Tunis. The new destination was far west of our old base at Bengasi. Bengasi had been termed Middle East and this was called North Africa. We remembered Tunis from our landing there after our long raid on Wiener Neustadt.
Anticlimax of anticlimaxes, but it was back to Africa! One of the things I hate worst in the world is an anticlimax, and war is full of them. It just wasn't won in the time I had planned it. This was a war where newspapers and magazines showed the enemy lines continually being split a dozen ways by great spearheads. How could the enemy withstand the spearheads we had pointed so ominously at them from all directions in Italy? How could the enemy stand it elsewhere? The newspapers showed maps with spearheads pointing in huge arcs. Every great slash was a partial encirclement. Then, as so many times after I read of “flanking attacks” “threatening to cut off” so many thousands of the enemy; strong units “pocketed,” “trapped,” or in any one of a dozen ways rendered hopeless in their efforts to avoid their inevitable fate. Didn't the enemy know what was going on? What was the sense in their trying to sustain such weak defenses, when all one had to do was to look at a paper to see how our great spearheads were smashing them to bits? I hated the pictorial representations of the progress of the war and I especially hated those maps with spearheads on them. I was going back to Africa just because the enemy had managed once more to blunt all our journalistic spearheads and break away to attack again. I made a mental note never to look at another war map.
How we got back to Africa, I don't remember. I remember being there, but I don't remember flying there. We found ourselves plunked into the lap of another group operating from a small, inadequate base at Tunis. We were as welcome as the visiting in-laws. The theory was that with a minimum of effort on the part of everyone, each squadron of our group could be processed and serviced by a squadron of the group permanently stationed there. I was lucky to be stationed with a squadron that had an incompetent major commanding. Without ever saying it, I convinced him I ranked him by a long time. Actually, he had received his promotion to major about two months prior to our arrival, and I had received mine about two weeks before that date. I did have a much lower serial number than his and that convinced him. I never “pulled my rank” on him, but I left in his mind a strong suspicion that I might if I didn't get what I wanted. I have always hated the sort of officer who resorts to pulling rank, but I had to veer a little bit here to keep my men from suffering. And the result of this bluff was that my boys ate better, had more transportation, were better housed and cared for than they might have been. But in spite of it all, we didn't fare so well.
Africa was turning from a furnace to a quagmire. We had such quaint occurrences as cloudbursts. Our tent was on the side of a hill that kept water from standing in the floor, but during the rain there was little we could do but pull up the sides of the tent and lie in our cots while the water ran through in a solid sheet. After an hour or so, if we were lucky, we could walk to the mess hall without completely bogging down in the muck.
As the days passed Murph, my engineering officer and tentmate, made living a little easier for us, for he turned up with some eggs, which were a special treat. I discovered he had located the family of a French farmer nearby and had taken the jeep I had talked out of our host, the other squadron commander, and visited them. He carried some candy he had bought at an American PX to “le petit enfant de la Famille.” Though he had a vocabulary of about twenty words, when he said the ones he knew with gestures you'd think he was glib at it. But his pronunciation was superb, and, given a month to practice the language, he would have it down pat, both grammar and idiom. For the moment it was good enough to produce fresh eggs.
In spite of rains and mud we did operate. The worst part of the trip by far was the fact that, though we had come post haste, we really served no great purpose when we arrived. The crisis had passed with General Clark's army. That might have been foreseen, but no risk could be taken that it might have gone otherwise. We had come to be available if needed and I could understand that. Those ground soldiers must have had some bitter times on that beachhead. And I wished that since we were there, the order sending us might have come sooner, so that we could have helped more. As it was, most of our operations were against several rail junctions in northern Italy and the port town of Bastia in northern Corsica. Though these raids were of some benefit to the armies in Italy, they were, for the most part, considered “milk runs” by our crews.
After running two or three missions that seemed only moderately important, we heard a rumor that we might bomb Wiener Neustadt again. It hadn't been bombed since that day back in August when we hit it from Bengasi. From Tunis the raid wouldn't be as long as the first one was, which was one real advantage. When we first heard that we might be going back many thought that it would be a long but easy mission. The idea behind that was that we'd been there before and met only meager opposition, and so we should find it easy to go there again. I disagreed. I knew from the intelligence reports that we had on the importance of the installations there that the Nazis must have bolstered their defenses a great deal. I felt it would be the same old story told about many heavy bomber units hitting an important target the second time. The second time you usually get your pants shot off.
Then too, I had heard stories about flak guns—that only brand new flak guns are extremely accurate. After firing even a comparatively few rounds the carriages loosen up, so that the guns are much less accurate firing on a formation flying at twenty-three or twenty-four thousand feet. When we were over Wiener Neustadt before there was no heavy flak. Wh
atever guns they had there now, I reasoned, would probably be new ones, since they certainly wouldn't bring in used guns to a place as important as that. In addition to my reasoned ideas, I had a host of unexplainable suspicions that the second raid on Wiener Neustadt, if run now by us, would be a very rough raid.
After a few days of rumors I got word that we really would run the raid. There was no particular pressure on me to go. In any case, I wouldn't be allowed to lead the group or even be deputy leader. Thus if I went it would be merely to lead my squadron. But one thing entered the picture to make it a little different. That was that General Jimmie Hodges, our division commander, would be in the lead ship of our group and with us he would be leading the three groups flying that day. When the general rode, the bars were down for other subordinate unit commanders. That is, though I might generally be limited to fly on those missions where I might be group leader or deputy group leader, if the general flew I could fly in any capacity I could fit into. At that time I didn't know General Hodges except as one of the big names far up the line. He was older than many of the young generals of the Air Corps. In the latter class would fall our wing commander, the newly promoted Brigadier-General Ted Timberlake. But General Hodges by this and other similar indications was giving us to understand that he considered himself a combat man. He not only considered himself one, but I came to find out he really was one.
I had known if there was another trip to this Austrian airplane factory I would be on it. I set up Ed Fowble to lead my squadron of six ships flying the low left position on the group lead. Ed and I had seen some rough ones together. We rode over Messina together in the old days before the Sicilian invasion began and saw the best flak the Jerries had to offer in Sicily; we ran the gauntlet at Ploesti together, and we'd damn well take a second look at Wiener Neustadt together.
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