In my own department I had Captain Bill Selvidge of Ardmore, Oklahoma. He was my first assistant operations officer and chief controller. Bill was a great wit, a pilot who had completed a tour in my old group, a lawyer and former state legislator. He was a good-looking, slightly balding fellow, with a straight-line moustache.
As my wing bombardier there was the small, hyperfunctioning John Fino, a captain who soon became a major. My navigator was Mac McClain, the Waterloo, Iowa, redhead who had guided the ship I was in on many rough missions, including the group's first raid into Germany and the shoot-fest we attended in Norway. Mac had been on Wright's crew. He was made a captain toward the end of his tour and brought into this headquarters to supervise the work of the navigators of the three groups.
And then there was our general. For many, many months my opinion of General Ted had gradually been taking shape. I remembered well the first time I ever saw him. He was a full colonel then, standing outside the group operations tent at Bengasi. It was just before he took off to lead the long, first raid on Wiener Neustadt in Austria. His powerful face made a great impression on me. I thought it the type of face that should be carved on the side of a mountain somewhere.
That face was a good representation of what was behind it. Once, when I was a group operations officer at a critique of one of our missions, I challenged the whole system of bombing used by the Eighth Air Force. General Ted was there. I proposed a radical plan which would completely change the mode of flying of the strategic bombers. Of course, I knew it wouldn't get anywhere, but as a proposal it at least precipitated argument which threw some light on questions not previously discussed. The general surprised me by his eager participation in the discussion, for then I realized he was no hidebound follower of tradition. He was quite willing to accept any innovation based on sound logic and to be a trailblazer. His horizons were not the limits of his West Point texts. He had the imagination necessary for the ingenious operation of a military command.
General Timberlake, like his academy classmate Colonel Arnold, was a great commanding officer. They were the only two officers whom I knew well over a period of some time who never showed the slightest evidence of low morale. Both of them had officers under them coming periodically to seek bolstering of their spirits by airing real or fancied complaints. Neither of them, so far as I could ever see, went to anyone higher up to seek such assistance, nor did either show any visible evidence of periodic depression. From my experience in the combat zone, I consider such forbearance to be one of the greatest assets a commander can have. His command will love him if he can carry the gripes of all those under him with never a complaint of his own. In the combat zone, as elsewhere, there are injustices done everyone at times—chiefly in matters of promotion or comparative recognition passed out among several officers who may deserve equal credit, but who actually get very different rewards. Under the pressure of the continued strain of war and in the face of two or three successive injustices, though the points involved may be minor, an officer's mettle can be sorely tested.
Another side of the general was revealed by the feeling of those under him that it was a pleasure to render him the courtesy and respect that he was entitled to demand. He never demanded it, but he always got it. He had an air of levity about him that made him seem quite informal, but all of us under him knew he would not respect an officer who failed in matters of normal military courtesy, whether it directly involved himself or other officers within his command.
All the officers of the wing headquarters ate meals together at one big table. Dinner was the high point of the day. Normally the chief of staff sat on the general's right and I sat on his left. Sometimes the discussions got a little boisterous, though never too much so. All closets were opened and all skeletons dragged out for what laughs they might produce. Major Morton Macks, my predecessor who stayed in the headquarters for a few weeks after my arrival, was high man at getting laughs. The moment anyone got too serious Mort would step in. He could be the overbearing cad, the dumb guy just trying to get along, or the utter maniac. We never knew how he would meet a situation. Carmelo Alba and Johnnie Fino caught their share of comment. The general once fondly said he was going to have to call his command Little Italy if he got in one more character of their type.
During one phase of our lives together it became more or less customary for everyone to go to extremes in granting courtesy to the general. This, I think, sprang from the fact that there were a few very obsequious officers in another local headquarters who continually groveled before their commanding general. And so some of our officers enjoyed burlesquing them in their behavior toward General Ted.
In regard to the source of the burlesque, Mike Phipps had a story about a full colonel who each morning would walk in and stand in front of his commanding general's desk. According to Mike, the colonel would say, “Sir!” whereupon the general would look up with some irritation from the mass of papers in front of him and ask, “Well, what do you want?”
“Oh, nothing, sir—just sir, sir.”
And so Mike sometimes addressed General Timberlake as “sir, general, sir.”
I was happy in these surroundings. The associations I made there were a large part of my happiness. Another large part of it was the fact that I felt I would soon be going back to Anne and Pete.
When I first arrived in the wing there was a shortage of qualified people to do the work of controller. As a result I had to work almost every night for a while. Mort Macks was fine at the job, but since he hadn't been off for a long time, he went on leave. Bill Selvidge was sick in the hospital for a time and there was no one else to do the work but me. It required my being in or very near the operations office from late in the afternoon until after the ships took off in the morning.
The job worked something like this. Usually about four in the afternoon we would get a call from the division which would give us a “stand by until 2300.” That means that more than likely we would have a mission, but that the field order might not start coming in on the teletypes until eleven that night. This warning would come in by way of a conference call from the division operations officer or division controller to all wing controllers or operations officers on a simultaneous telephone plug-in. I would immediately call the information to the groups.
There would not be much to do from that time until after dinner. When dinner was over I would go to the operations office to sweat out the arrival of the field order. Usually a field order would begin coming in on the teletypes about 10 or 11 P.M. Sometimes after coming in it would be canceled; sometimes it would be changed completely at a later hour; sometimes it would be changed only slightly. Sometimes—though rarely—we would be notified that no operations were anticipated for the next day. On those rare occasions I would leave a skeleton crew in the office and go to bed.
According to the normal procedure, the division field order would start coming in sometime between ten and eleven in the evening. As fast as it rattled off our teletypes I would begin preparing the wing field order. The wing would be called on for a designated number of aircraft. Sometimes we used only two groups to supply them when it was possible to do so, and sometimes all three would have to go to make up the required strength. I would decide that matter. I would decide which of our groups would lead and which would carry one type of bomb and which would carry another if the bomb load was diversified. I would also designate the gas load to be carried, and all the other details division left to us to determine.
I decided these matters, but tentatively, because almost without exception General Ted would stride in just about the time our field order was complete and go over it to the minutest detail. He was more careful of these details when I was new to the wing than he was later. But after a month or so of this kind of work, it became standard procedure for all controllers to make up the order just the way the general wanted. Then he would glance over the order and okay it to go out with practically no changes.
The operations office at e
leven o'clock at night was alive and businesslike, but there was an air about it of convivial excitement. Everyone was keyed up by the suspense and joy of knowing that we were cooking up a lethal surprise for the Krauts.
When the field order was approved, I would put it on the wire. Then I could take off to get a cup of hot coffee and some bread and butter or whatever was available. After that there would be little doing for several hours. Frequently the groups would brief about 2:30 or 3:00 A.M. I would usually give a conference call to the group operations officers or whoever the groups had put in charge of running the mission and designated to do the briefings. The purpose of that call was to insure that each of the briefing officers understood all the field order and that each knew what the other groups were going to do in matters of assembling the wing formation, uncovering to make the bomb run, reassembly after leaving the target, etc. At this time any officer of one of the groups had a chance to clear up points he might have to discuss with me or with any other group.
After the conference call I could usually take a catnap in my chair at the desk. Sometimes I would read some of Mike Phipps's intelligence reports and, as often as I could, I read a pony issue of Time or some other American magazine. New issues of Time always caused excitement in the headquarters; sometimes we got them within eight days of their date of sale in the States.
The time between the last conference call and breakfast always seemed momentary. That was because it was filled with naps, sometimes interrupted by telephone calls, but rarely anything to occasion much mental effort. Of course the next memorable point would be breakfast. Often the general would be first in the mess, well ahead of the deadline at eight o'clock. Then I would give him a résumé of the way the mission had gone since midnight. I would eat and go to bed, sometimes to get up for lunch and sometimes to sleep until almost dinner time. While I was asleep the office would be looked after by an assistant controller.
That was the routine of the “normal” mission. If the current operation were of unusual importance the general would be in the office much later in the evening, sometimes all night long. On my nights on there was usually someone out of intelligence working with me—Mike, Fred Jarecki, or Vic Sieverding. The intelligence officer on duty was there to catch an occasional important problem. Such a problem might arise if one of the groups didn't have full information in its files on the target to be hit. In that case, whoever was working from intelligence would get out the necessary information by direct courier. On occasions when the matter was not determined by the division, our intelligence officer gave us very good advice about the way to make the best run in to the target from the standpoint of flak defenses. We had a sharp bunch on that subject and several times successfully went to bat with the division on the way they planned the run in or route out.
Several times a week members of the general's staff who didn't stay up all night working up the mission would have themselves awakened at 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning to drive to one or more of our airfields and attend the briefings. The general felt the importance of keeping close tab on the groups, so that we might be sure the crews got all the information available before going out. At least once a week General Ted attended a briefing, and once, in the case of an exceptionally sad situation, he took over and did a briefing himself. He covered instructions which usually come from the operations, intelligence, communications, and weather sections of the group.
The work at the wing was exciting and never ending, though there were brief letups. Sometimes there was a letup when the ships took off. That letup might last until they came home again but often it didn't. If the weather was bad or as questionable as it usually was, someone had to keep close check, so that the formation plan might be changed to facilitate quicker forming of the airplanes. Such changes in plan would be radioed to the leader. This job, again, was the responsibility of the controller on duty.
To the end of effecting better formations the general got a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter for the wing staff. As operations officer I considered it my personal ship. Shortly after our groups were airborne someone from the wing would take off in the Thunderbolt. Often he would fly through hazy weather and help the leader of one formation to find another. Always he herded in the stragglers and made note of anyone not maintaining proper position. This monitoring aircraft would follow the group formations until the wing was formed, and continue until our wing fell into its proper position in the division column. It would continue with the bombers until the point of departure from the friendly coast and then it would return and land. Sometimes the general flew it, sometimes I did but when we didn't, whoever did would report to him on landing.
The duty controller who took over in the morning had a good deal to do, though rarely as much as the one who set up the mission the night before. During the mission the wing operations office would get reports on all ships returning early. These abortive aircraft had to be carefully checked, though there was very rarely any evidence of lack of courage on the part of the aircrews. It naturally discouraged abortions for the men to know that an intensive engineering report was given on any aircraft coming in early after failing to accomplish its mission.
As the day wore on and a mission progressed, control point messages would come in from the formation leaders. These messages would enable our headquarters to keep track of the progress of our ships over enemy territory. Finally at a climax of the waiting a strike message would arrive. It would be a brief report that the target had been attacked and it would give the first estimate of results. The controller on duty had to make continued checks on the weather as the planes were on their route home. If conditions were expected to be bad at the bases there were all sorts of special measures to be taken to aid in getting the ships in. The various group operations offices had to be informed and checked to see that they had taken proper action to meet the situation.
Before the ships were due, three groups of officers of wing headquarters would depart, one for each of the different fields. The general would always go to one and other representatives would go to others to be on hand when the crews arrived for interrogation. Thus the wing representatives would get the picture firsthand from the forming up of the groups, wings, and divisions, the route out, uncovering at the initial point, bombing, rally, and route back. A careful check would be made of all enemy activity by flak or fighters and of our own bombing accuracy and the quality of formation flying. The wing representatives would usually go from one table to another in the interrogation rooms trying to get an accurate overall picture. Generally the best story of how the mission ran would be obtained from the command pilots and their lead crews. Frequently the wing representatives would wait for the developed bombing pictures, unless circumstances indicated the necessity for an immediate return to wing headquarters to report. After the verbal report it took only about half an hour more to get the pictures. All this activity of wing officers was in addition to the usual intelligence interrogation of crews. Our purpose was to get a flash report quickly to enable us to ascertain enough of the results to aid in planning the next mission, usually already taking shape. The more detailed report resulting from a complete interrogation would come in later on the teletypes and hit every headquarters up to Air Force.
If the wing representatives decided not to wait for the bomb strike photos, the groups would deliver them to the control towers of the various fields. At a set time very soon after the last ships had landed we would send someone in a cub airplane assigned to our headquarters to pick up this film. If I had been the controller on duty the night before, the job was likely to fall to me. I would drive my jeep down the line of the central airdrome, having arranged by a telephone call for the little ship to be ready to go and for the tower clearance on the triangular flight to the other two fields. I would hop in the plane, a mechanic would spin the prop, and I would take off a very few minutes after leaving headquarters. I could take off in a few hundred feet and seldom went to the trouble of taxiing out to a runway. I would give the
plane the throttle and fly it right out of the end of the hangar; then I would dip by the tower so that the tower control officer would be sure to see me and call the other fields to tell them to have the pictures ready. When I got over one of the fields I would make my landing so that the plane would stop its roll at the foot of the tower. I would leave the engine running, and a man would come running out to hand me the pictures. In an instant I would be off again to the other field, where the process would be repeated. Then I would fly back to the central airdrome with the first photo record of the day's bombing results. It was a very good system, and we prided ourselves on having our bombing pictures before any other wing headquarters in the division. It was just one small peculiarity typical of General Ted.
All this reporting of the results didn't end a mission. If the day were not too far along by this time, a critique would be held at the wing operations office about three hours after all the ships had landed. This would be attended by all the command pilots and the lead first pilots, bombardiers, and navigators of the three groups. At the critiques someone of my force would take extensive notes. This job generally fell to Bill Selvidge or me.
In all three proceedings Mike Phipps figured prominently. Mike was not only an intelligence officer, but also a wing gunnery officer. That gave him another avenue of interest. Johnnie Fino and Mac McClain helped everywhere. Johnnie, with his quick mind, was very good at attending interrogations and bringing back an angle or two which might have been missed by others. Mac would spend hours pouring over the navigators’ logs. He always knew where all the ships were every minute of each mission, even though many of the navigators who had flown the mission might have been lost. By analyzing all the navigators’ logs he could spot the causes of error in the few which messed up.
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