To Kingdom Come (6 page)

At the mess hall, he had his breakfast eggs with English bangers, the spicy sausages he liked slathered with English mustard fortified with horseradish. It definitely opened his nasal passages.

The briefing hut for the officers of the 388th was another large, windowless hut with poured concrete floors. It had a small stage at the back facing more than a hundred folding chairs. The chairs were set up in two rows, with space down the middle for the group commander and his staff to enter and depart.

Shortly before 0330, the pilots, copilots, navigators, and bombardiers surged into the briefing hut from the mess hall. The Greek lit his first cigarette and waited for the room to warm up from the heat of their bodies.

As usual, the noise level was high as they speculated on what the target might be. On the stage, a pair of thick curtains hid a big map of Europe. Before the briefing began, the curtains would be drawn back by an intelligence officer. That’s when the men would find out where they were going.

Their previous mission on September 4 had been a milk run to Meulan in northern France, and all nineteen planes in the group had come back safely. The Greek hadn’t even seen an enemy fighter.

The big room quickly filled with cigarette smoke. Most of the men smoked to calm their nerves. The Greek enjoyed Raleighs, the coupon type he bought for ten cents a pack.

At 0330, the men were called to attention as Colonel Bill David, the commander of the 388th Bomb Group, came into the hut and strode to the stage with his staff trailing behind. The group operations officer drew back the curtain on the map. It produced a small roar of sound.

A line of red yarn connected their base at Knettishall to Stuttgart, Germany, deep inside southern Germany. The yarn almost ran off the far edge of the map. The operations officer told them that they would be attacking a critically important strategic target, the SKF instrument-bearing plants. Next to the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, it was the most important target in Germany, he said.

The Greek wasn’t particularly interested in the strategic importance of the target. He assumed they wouldn’t be sending them there unless it was important. What he wanted to know were the more practical details, like the group’s relative position in the massive formation, and whether any diversions had been planned to keep the German fighters off their necks.

The operations officer told them it would be the longest mission ever undertaken by the Eighth Air Force. The route to Stuttgart was along a heavily defended enemy fighter belt, but diversionary flights had been planned in which four groups of B-24 bombers would draw off the German fighters on a mission over the North Sea, while another eight groups of B-26 medium bombers attacked enemy airfields in France and Holland.

The weather over the target was expected to be mostly clear. The group would bomb from twenty-three thousand feet. From takeoff to return, they would be in the air about seven hours. A group of American P-47 fighters would escort them into France, and nine squadrons of British Spitfires would be waiting to escort them home on the route back.

For communication with the P-47s, the VHF radio call sign for the bombers would be PHONEBOX, and for the fighters, HAYBANK. For radioing the Spitfires, the call sign for the bombers was WINDBAG, and the fighters, CROKAY.

Since the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid, a joke had begun circulating at the briefings. “Now we have fighters with us all the way,” it went. “Our P-47s take us as far as France. The Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs take us to the target and back. Then the P-47s pick us up again in France.”

For the Stuttgart mission, they would be on their own for over four hours.

After takeoff, the 388th would join up with the 96th Bomb Group over Gravesend and then assemble with the rest of the 157 Fortresses of the Fourth Bomb Wing over Dungeness in Kent before heading across the English Channel. The Fourth Wing was leading the whole attack, with the 96th Bomb Group first in line. The 388th would be tucked into the low position of the first combat box.

That wasn’t good news. The low group in the lead formation was referred to as “coffin corner,” because the enemy fighters often focused their head-on attacks on the low group, starting with its lowest squadron at the base of the multigroup combat box and working their way up.

Staring up at the blackboard on the front of the stage, the Greek saw that the 388th was putting up twenty-four bombers for the mission. His own Fortress,
Slightly Dangerous II
, was in the second element of the lead squadron, just above the low squadron.

When the operations officer finished his briefing and opened it up to questions, one of the pilots asked what they could expect as far as enemy fighter activity around Stuttgart.

“The target area is practically void of fighters,” the ops officer assured him.

Andy

Monday, 6 September 1943
306th Bomb Group
“The Reich Wreckers”
Thurleigh, England
First Lieutenant Martin “Andy” Andrews
0230

H
e awoke with the battered copy of
War and Peace
lying across his chest. The lamp was still on next to his bunk. He could hear the voice of the ops clerk as he slowly came down the hallway, waking the officers who were scheduled to go on the mission.

Most of the squadron’s officers, all second lieutenants, lived in the big communal room that took up most of the Quonset hut. As a first lieutenant, Andy had been assigned one of the single rooms along the hallway at the end of the building.

There was a low knock at the door.

“Briefing at 0300, Lieutenant Andrews.”

He called out an acknowledgment.

First Lieutenant Martin Andrews. All his life, he had been called Martin or Marty, but shortly after being assigned his new B-17 crew, the navigator, Lieutenant Gordon Bowers, had begun calling him Andy. It quickly took hold with the others.

In England, their crew had been assigned to the 306th Bomb Group. It was the oldest operational unit in England, and the first one to lead an attack on a target inside Germany.

After washing at the small sink in his room, Andy put on his flight suit, boots, and a fleece-lined leather jacket. He drew a white silk scarf around his neck and tucked it into his flying suit before heading over to the officers’ mess hall. Before a mission, he always forced himself to eat a big meal, knowing that he wouldn’t have another for six hours or more.

After finishing breakfast, he headed to the 306th’s briefing hut with the other officers. Sitting down, he glanced at the blackboard in the front of the room. The group was sending up twenty-one B-17s for the mission. Each plane was identified with the pilot’s name, showing its place in the group formation. Andy would be leading one of the high elements in the group.

When the group commander gave the word to begin the briefing, the operations officer pulled back the curtain covering the big map of Europe. As in every briefing hut across southern England that morning, a length of yarn connected the group’s base to the city of Stuttgart, Germany.

The 306th was going to destroy the Bosch Magneto Works, he announced to the chorus of groans that invariably erupted when the target was Germany. Magnetos were critically important to the German war machine. The 306th was going to make sure there were a lot fewer of them by the end of the day.

Stuttgart would be the group’s longest mission ever, he added.

Fuel would have to be conserved. Although the newer-model B-17s in the group were equipped with “Tokyo tanks” under the wings, which added more than a thousand miles to their range, most of the planes in the group didn’t have them.

Andy’s B-17 was an older model and didn’t have the extra fuel. He remembered their July 28 mission to Kassel, when his Fortress had nearly run out of gas on the way home. After reaching the French coast, he was forced to shut down his two outboard engines and put the plane into a power glide with the remaining two in order to reach the base.

This would be his thirteenth mission. Lucky thirteen. He wasn’t supposed to be flying it. After twelve missions, his crew had been scheduled to spend a week at a rest camp in Cornwall. Those orders were changed when another pilot in the squadron began exhibiting mental problems after four men in his crew were killed over Schweinfurt. He and his remaining crew members had been sent to the rest camp instead.

For Andy, the toughest part of combat wasn’t facing the enemy. It was getting up in the middle of the night to fly the missions. He had been having trouble sleeping ever since the 306th’s July 4 raid to Nantes, France, in the Loire Valley.

It was supposed to be a milk run. On America’s national holiday, the Eighth Air Force had decided to deliver a statement by sending its groups to attack enemy airfields in occupied France. The 306th was ordered to bomb a German air installation near Nantes.

As a boy, Independence Day had been one of Andy’s favorite holidays. Every year, he would ride his bicycle with red, white, and blue crepe threaded between its wheels in the Milwaukee parade. Afterward there would be ice cream and fireworks. Now he would be celebrating it by dropping several tons of high explosives.

What happened on that mission was seared into his memory. The 306th had encountered no fighter opposition on its way to the target. As they approached Nantes, the lead squadron in the formation flew straight and level for almost two minutes as the lead bombardier drew a bead on the target. The lead plane’s bomb bay doors had just swung open when Andy saw the first bursts of antiaircraft fire coming up from the ground below.

Within seconds, the greasy smoke from exploding shells filled the sky directly ahead of them. The Germans were using their famed 88s, the finest antiaircraft cannons in the world, which hurled a twenty-pound shell five miles straight up in the air with deadly accuracy.

During training, the pilots had been taught to avoid flak by taking evasive action. But that was impossible. To reach the target at Nantes and drop their bombs, they had to fly through the umbrella barrage.

Suddenly, a plane ahead of Andy’s blew up, literally vaporizing before his eyes. A few moments later, a plane on his left was hit by another cannon burst. Its right wing sheared off and the front half of the fuselage spiraled down. The rear section of the shattered Fortress continued flying forward several seconds as one man escaped the wreckage. He was on fire as he hurtled out of sight.

At the same time, Andy heard the excited voice of his tail gunner on the plane’s intercom, calling out that the plane behind them had just exploded, too. Miraculously, no one in Andy’s crew was killed or wounded. As they flew home, Andy pondered the old adage that luck was a matter of inches. Over Nantes, it had been a matter of micro millimeters. A fractional change in the gun settings of those batteries would have blown them out of the sky.

After Nantes, he began having nightmares. On nights before a mission, he would stay up reading until finally nodding off for an hour or two of ragged sleep. Maybe war was harder on pilots with vivid imaginations, he concluded.

Andy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1918; his mother had died in a flu epidemic three days after he was born. His father was a stoic man who had emigrated to the United States from Larvik, Norway. Later, he had become the captain of a Great Lakes ore ship, and was away from home for weeks at a time.

An introspective child, Andy became a voracious reader. Growing up, he imagined himself attempting great feats of daring like the young heroes he read about in books by Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. When Charles Lindbergh came to Milwaukee to appear in a parade, Andy saw him pass by to the cheers of the adoring crowd. Afterward, he daydreamed that he would be the first eight-year-old boy to fly alone across the Atlantic.

After finishing high school, he devised a novel approach to broadening his education. Instead of going to college, he shipped out on a freighter to Europe. In Germany, he planned to study Goethe, Kant, and Schiller in their native language. Then he would head for France to apply the same approach to Racine and Molière. The last phase of his schooling would be in Italy, where he planned to study Dante and Petrarch, the father of Humanism.

In September 1939, his plans were interrupted by Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Returning home from Germany, he entered the Great Books of Western Civilization program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he developed a proficiency in ancient languages. For fun, he translated the New Testament into Greek.

With war raging in Europe, he decided to leave college. He was convinced that America would soon be in the war and joined the army air corps, winning his wings shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Blond, blue-eyed, and a rugged six feet tall, he hoped to become a fighter pilot, but at basic flying school in South Carolina, the colonel lined up the cadets by height. The shorter ones were sent into fighters, the tall ones into multiengine bombers. Andy was disgusted. To him, flying bombers was like driving a truck.