To Kingdom Come (5 page)

His best friend in the unit was a forty-year-old sergeant named Woody Cabot. Woody was the guy who had started calling Olen “Reb,” short for Southern rebel. The name had stuck. One morning, he told Woody that he had decided to volunteer to become a machine gunner. He decided that being a member of the ground crew was too tame an occupation in the middle of a shooting war.

Don’t be a fool, Woody told him. Only one crew out of three was successfully making it through the twenty-five missions they were required to fly before they could go home.

Reb went in to see the old man anyway. After Reb told him why he was there, Colonel Peaslee got up from behind his desk to shake his hand. Battle losses had badly depleted the group’s reserve of spare gunners, he said, and then told Reb he was impressed that he had the moxie to volunteer.

“Same ole rebel,” Woody had said afterward. “If the whiskey and women don’t kill you, the Jerries will.”

“I’ve got a guardian angel,” Reb assured him, and Woody laughed.

Within days, he was at gunnery school on the “Wash,” a remote estuary along the eastern coast of England. The men trained hard all day, firing .50-caliber machine guns from ground emplacements at moving targets. To Reb, it felt like he was holding on to a wild boar by its hind legs. At night, they would get drunk on vanilla extract pinched from the mess hall.

When the training ended, he returned to the 384th. Reb hoped he would be assigned to a permanent crew in one of the group’s four squadrons, but instead he was sent to a replacement barracks at a far corner of the air base. A crudely written sign over the entrance read, “House of the Bastards.”

Twenty men lived in the barracks, but that number dropped precipitously after the air offensive began against Germany. Following each mission, the personal effects of the lost gunners would be quickly removed. It was like they had never been there.

Except for their meals at the mess hall, Reb and the others rarely came into contact with the regular combat crews until they were assigned to one of the Fortresses for a mission.

He was pleasantly surprised to discover that combat crewmen enjoyed a different lifestyle than the ground personnel. At the mess hall, his food was served on a white tablecloth with real dishes instead of mess kits and canteen cups. Instead of powdered eggs and Spam, the combat crews enjoyed fresh eggs and bacon on the morning of each mission.

Now, he was going out again.

As dawn began to pale the sky on September 6, Reb arrived back at Grafton Underwood. He was too late to eat his combat breakfast. He had also missed the mission briefing that took place right after breakfast, and had no idea where the group was going, or which crew he would be flying with that day.

It was a maximum effort, all right. The roads on the base were choked with vehicle traffic. With the blackout in effect, and headlights mostly painted out, the fuel trucks and bomb carriers moved across the landscape like a fleet of fireflies. From every direction, Reb could hear the roar of 1,200-horsepower radial engines.

He watched the crews heading out to their planes on jeeps, bicycles, and trucks.

The military policeman took Reb directly to the parachute hut. A noncom told him it was going to be a high-altitude mission, and he needed cold weather flight gear. Reb had stripped down to his skivvies when he suddenly realized that he was missing his dog tag, then quickly remembered he had put it on the shelf over his bunk before heading over to the showers to get ready for his date with Estella.

It was too late to go get it now, he concluded, as he put on a blue heat suit with matching boots and gloves. The suit was honeycombed with tiny wires that would be plugged into an electrical outlet aboard the plane once they were airborne. Over the heat suit, he put on green gabardine flying coveralls, followed by an inch-thick, sheepskin-lined leather jacket, pants, helmet, and boots.

He was already sweating when he walked outside into the mild autumn air. The same military policeman was waiting in the jeep to run him out to the plane he had been assigned for the mission. It was a Fortress in the 546th Squadron called the
Yankee Raider
.

Yankee Raider
. An odd fit for a good ol’ Arkansas rebel, he thought.

When he arrived at the hardstand where the plane was parked, he could see the men in the crew surrounding the plane. A few of them were sitting on the ground. They stared up at him as he climbed out of the jeep.

He could imagine what they were thinking.

Here comes our new waist gunner, a guy whose marksmanship might be needed to save our lives from an attacking fighter, and he is being delivered by an MP. It definitely didn’t inspire confidence.

An officer detached himself from the group and came toward him. It was the pilot, a second lieutenant. He was a big, lanky guy, better than six feet tall, built like a linebacker. The lieutenant reached out to shake his hand.

Jesus, he looks even younger than me, thought Reb.

The Greek

Sunday, 5 September 1943
388th Bomb Group
Knettishall, England
Second Lieutenant Demetrios Karnezis
2200

T
he officers’ club at Knettishall Airfield did not share the same amenities as the Dorchester bar in London, and its décor wasn’t quite as atmospheric as Manhattan’s Stork Club.

The bare interior walls were fiberboard panels trimmed with batten board strips. Heat was provided by a coke-burning stove in the center of the room. Tables and chairs dotted the floor space. The bar’s countertop was constructed of wooden planks. Behind it, an off-duty GI cook served drinks.

It was spartan, but the fliers of the 388th Bomb Group were happy to have it.

In September 1943, the officers’ club drink menu wasn’t expansive. One could order gin. The gin was served straight up or splashed with grapefruit juice from the cartons of number-five juice cans stacked along the wall behind the countertop. A newly arrived replacement might grouse about the lack of scotch or bourbon or soda water. After a few drinks, it didn’t matter.

The Greek drank his gin with grapefruit juice. After knocking off two or three, he would feel the alcohol begin to cauterize his brain, which was good, particularly after the group’s recent missions. So far, he had survived nine of them, including Regensburg.

For many of the combat fliers, the nights after rough missions brought vivid nightmares, usually related to the horrific things they had witnessed in the sky. One pilot called them heartbreak dreams, the ones about the friends who were never coming back, or of B-17s exploding in the sky like skeet in a shooting gallery.

There were plenty of bad dreams after the 388th’s mission to Hannover at the beginning of the German air offensive. Antiaircraft flak had been terrifyingly accurate over the target. When the seventeen planes of the 388th reached Hannover, Johnny Denton’s
Mister Yank
was hit by two shell bursts, one on the left wing and a second on the right. The plane exploded. Earl Horn’s
A Little Horne
was hit a few moments later. His plane blew up, too. While the group was still over the target, Bill Beecham’s
Impatient Virgin
collided with Ed Wick’s
Wolf Pack
after Beecham was wounded by a cannon burst. As the group fought its way back to England, three more planes in the group, Aubrey Bobbitt’s Fortress, along with
Wee Bonnie
and
La Chiquita
, had been shot down by German fighters.

The night after the mission, one of the group’s pilots left the air base without authorized leave. When they brought him back, he refused to fly again. For those who stayed to fight, there was self-medication. Although regulations prohibited drinking alcohol within twenty-four hours of a mission, the rule wasn’t enforced.

Along with gin, the officers used gallows humor to deal with their fears. Sid Alford, a Jewish bombardier from New York, flew in the Greek’s squadron. Alford had been wounded on five missions, giving him a silver cluster to his initial Purple Heart medal. On the fifth mission, Alford had been manning the nose gun of his Fortress when an inward propeller on the Fortress went out of control. Its red-hot dome spun off, chopped through the metal bulkhead of Alford’s compartment, and sliced off a section of his buttocks.

Sid had just returned from the hospital, and the rest of them were toasting his return to active duty. Alford stood up to receive the toast, pulled his pants down, and said, “I want to show you all what a half-ass bombardier looks like.”

It was close to midnight and the Greek was feeling pretty mellow when one of the operations clerks walked into the club and came over. “Lieutenant Karnezis, you’re up for tomorrow’s mission, and the squadron commander suggests that you get some sleep. It’s going to be an early call.”

He had been born Demetrios Karnezis in Norfolk, Virginia, and was the son of Greek immigrants from Tripolis. His father operated a food concession stand at the entrance to the Norfolk Ferry Terminal.

Growing up, he was fascinated by electronic gadgets, often rummaging through the trash barrels of a radio shop near his father’s concession stand for discarded radio parts. One of his first inventions was a crude radio alarm clock that he gave to his amazed parents. At fourteen, he built a shortwave radio station in the attic. It had a long-range antenna that allowed the family to listen to the BBC in London and Adolf Hitler barking out his speeches to the Reichstag in Berlin.

By high school, he knew he wanted to become a career military officer, and decided to seek an appointment to West Point, focusing on achieving the grades and test scores that would make his selection a certainty. After earning the highest marks in the state on the entrance examination, he met his local congressman at a church function, and told him of his desire to attend the academy.

“Boy,” said the congressman, “don’t think that the young men who pass those exams are the ones selected to go.” When he spoke to his high school counselor about it, she said, “Well, that is the way of the world.”

Unable to afford college, he applied for work at the Bell Telephone Company. Impressed with the eighteen-year-old’s knowledge of electronics, they hired him to troubleshoot the breakdowns of the complicated switchboard devices at the Norfolk naval base. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, his supervisor told him that he didn’t have to worry about being drafted. He would be deferred due to the important nature of his work.

A friend who was in the army air corps came home on leave and told Demetrios how exciting it was to fly. That did it. His eyes had always been in the sky anyway, watching the planes taking off and landing at the air bases that surrounded Norfolk.

He applied and was accepted. At primary training school, he turned out to be a superb flier. After completing advanced flying school, he was one of the graduates chosen to go into fighters.

Along the way, he inherited the inevitable nickname “the Greek.”

In February 1943, he was informed that the air force had a surplus of fighter pilots waiting for overseas assignments, and that instead he would be sent for training on B-17s. For six weeks, he flew around the clock to catch up to the men who had undergone multiengine training. In May, he joined a crew and was sent to England, where they were assigned to the 388th Bomb Group in Knettishall.

The morning mission would be his tenth. Only fifteen to go after this one.

An early call meant it would probably be Germany again. Following the advice of his squadron commander to get some sleep, he left the officers’ club to walk back to his billet.

The Greek shared a large room in one of the Quonsets with nearly two dozen other officers, all of them pilots, copilots, navigators, and bombardiers in the same squadron. At night, the silence in the room would usually be punctuated by loud snoring. That didn’t bother the Greek. Occasionally, a man in the grip of a nightmare would scream out. That was harder to ignore.

At 0300, he was sleeping soundly in his bunk when a flashlight beam was shined in his eyes, and a voice said, “Briefing at 0330, Lieutenant Karnezis.”

It was a grim way to be woken up. Another twenty-four-hour life cycle. Birth, combat, survival or death. The Greek got up and went to the shower room. Like most of the other pilots, he shaved before each mission so his oxygen mask would fit tightly on his face when they climbed above ten thousand feet.

After showering, he put on a pair of gabardine twill uniform pants, a clean uniform shirt, and GI brogan shoes. Over his uniform, he wore flying coveralls and an A-2 horsehide leather flying jacket, with its light brown silk lining, knitted cuffs and waistband.

For good luck, he always carried a small Greek Orthodox icon in one of the zipper pockets of his coveralls. His mother had given it to him on his last leave before going overseas. It had a tiny painting of St. Demetrios, his patron saint, riding a horse.

On the base, he rode a bicycle instead of a horse. Enlisted men got their bicycles free. An officer had to buy one. If his plane went down, someone else would claim it and kick some money into the group morale fund.