To Kingdom Come (7 page)

He turned out to be a superb truck driver. In addition to his flying prowess, he memorized the B-17 tech manuals, and learned everything he could about the plane’s systems from the mechanics who worked on them. He became highly nuanced to the eccentricities of airplane engines. As a result, he was selected to become a flight instructor at the advanced flying school in Columbus, Mississippi.

There, he prided himself on being able to land a Flying Fortress so gently that his blindfolded students didn’t know they had landed. He was particularly good at formation flying, and stressed to his students how important it was for them to maintain a tight formation, presenting the smallest possible target to German fighter pilots.

After six months as an instructor, he found himself frustrated. What would he tell his children someday, that with the whole world engulfed in war, he trained cadets in Columbus, Mississippi? He requested a transfer to a combat unit. The application was granted.

On Memorial Day in 1943, he and his crew took off from Bangor, Maine, to join the war in a brand-new B-17. As they started across the Atlantic, he looked back for a last time at the heavily forested coast of Maine and wondered if they would all get home safely. When they arrived in England, their shiny new B-17 was taken away from them. A week later, they were assigned to the 306th Bomb Group, and given a battered B-17 warhorse to fly.

Andy quickly ran afoul of his squadron commander, who informed him that the enlisted men in his crew would receive a one-grade demotion until they had flown five missions. He protested, telling him that it would be a hardship on their families back home. When Andy discovered that the other squadron commanders in the group didn’t have the same policy, he appealed directly to the group commander, who reversed the edict.

The night before his first mission, Andy encountered one of his fellow flight instructors from back in Mississippi. He had come over months earlier, and was scheduled to fly his twenty-fifth mission the same day that Andy was flying his first. He invited Andy to attend the party at the officers’ club the group commander was throwing for him when he got back.

Because losses in Europe were so steep, the air force had created a policy designed to provide at least some hope to a combat crew that they would make it through. All they had to do was complete twenty-five missions before being sent back to the States.

At that point in the war, one crew in three was getting that far. The party turned out to be a wake. Although the crew made it, Andy’s friend had been killed by a 20-millimeter cannon round from a German fighter. It was the first time in his life Andy got drunk.

He soon discovered that aerial combat was a simple thing, but also quite profound. It wasn’t until one met the enemy in the air that reality sunk in. The Luftwaffe pilots were brave and skillful. They were among the best in the world. And they were trying very hard to kill him.

A man earned a reputation quickly in an outfit, good or bad. After the air offensive against Germany began, it seemed like more pilots were finding reasons to abort a mission after takeoff in order to return to the base. Most had good reasons, like an engine breakdown or the failure of a supercharger. But one pilot had aborted five missions in a row. Another had turned back after discovering a problem with the fuel-airratio gauge, a minor instrument. Back at the base, he was berated by the group commander in front of everyone.

No one wanted to join the order of the white feather.

After ten missions, Andy’s crewmen asked him why their B-17 didn’t have flashy nose art painted on it like the scantily clad beauties that graced the noses of other Fortresses. He agreed and told them to come up with a name. In the meantime, he asked the crew chief to stencil five Latin words in small letters under his cockpit window.

Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti
... No Way Is Impassable to Courage.

In June, he bought an old bicycle so that he could explore the countryside around Thurleigh. One afternoon, he found himself lost on a country lane. Encountering a young woman, he asked her for directions, and she volunteered to walk along with him to show him the way. Andy thought she was the loveliest girl he had ever seen. When they reached the turnoff, he asked to meet her again, and she agreed. Her name was Mavis, and she was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner.

On their first date, they met outside the Baptist Chapel on High Street in Thurleigh. Although the landscape was almost entirely flat, the old church rested on the side of a hill. Andy had come to enjoy spending evenings sitting on the hillside, reading until dark and watching RAF bombers taking off from their nearby base for their nightly attacks on German cities.

He invited Mavis to join him there. On their first evening together, she warned him that the grass on the hillside was sprinkled with stinging nettles. The next night she brought a blanket.

Mavis had been raised and educated in London, and knew all the museums and historical places Andy hoped to visit when he got leave. She cherished poetry as much as he did, and one night they recited their favorite Shakespeare sonnets to one another.

She was also an excellent cook. After he brought her a bag of Washington State apples that the combat fliers had been given, she made delicious apple tarts out of them, which they shared the next night.

There was mystery in her, too. Andy always volunteered to walk her home, but she declined. Her father didn’t like Yanks, she told him. She also wouldn’t go with him to a restaurant or pub. Like a beautiful phantom, she would simply appear on the hillside when he arrived there on his bicycle.

He was sure there must be a line of suitors in her life. Why him? Whatever the reason, she made his life between missions special. After they had spent more than a dozen of the long English summer evenings together, she asked him to make love to her.

He might not be coming back, he told her. He also expressed concern about her becoming pregnant. She said she would worry about that. After wrestling with the possible consequences, he decided to ignore the uncertainty of the future. They became first-time lovers. As the romance deepened, he hoped that she would eventually end the mystery in her background.

While he was falling in love with Mavis, Andy found another approach to curtail his nightmares. He had been reading Plato’s
Phaedo,
about the death of Socrates, in an old pocket-book edition of poetry when he discovered the “Choric Song” of
The Lotos-Eaters
, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s musings on death during Ulysses’s long voyage home from the Trojan War.

“All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave in silence; ripen, fall, and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
...
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore than labour in the deep midocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

Somehow, the words of the melancholy poem gave him peace of mind. It also led to a new ritual. As he sat in the cockpit waiting to take off on a mission, he would read a selection from the poem. After finishing it, he would place the pocket book in the breast pocket of his flight jacket over his heart.

He was prepared to die. He had lived to be twenty-four.

Bob

Monday, 6 September 1943
303rd Bomb Group
“Hell’s Angels”
Molesworth, England
Brigadier General Robert F. Travis
0330

F
or the pilots of the 303rd, the predawn intelligence briefing for the attack on Stuttgart sounded eerily similar to the one they had received three weeks earlier for the Schweinfurt raid.

The intelligence officer even used some of the same words in describing it, talking about how their group could possibly change the course of history, and that if they were successful, the Luftwaffe would soon be grounded because the Germans would have no ball bearings left.

Before they took off for Schweinfurt on August 17, Lieutenant Colonel Kermit Stevens, the 303rd Bomb Group commander, had told them, “If every pilot in this group were to dive his ship, fully manned and loaded with bombs, into the center of the target area, the mission would still be considered a success.”

His words hadn’t raised morale.

When Colonel Stevens and his staff arrived for the Stuttgart briefing, they were accompanied by a tall young brigadier general. As soon as the intelligence officers finished their part of the briefing, Colonel Stevens came forward to introduce him as the new commander of the Forty-first Combat Wing of the Eighth Air Force, which included the 303rd, the 379th, and the 384th Bomb Groups.

His name was Robert Falligant Travis.

Colonel Stevens said that Brigadier General Travis would be leading the Stuttgart mission, and proudly noted that he would be flying aboard the 303rd’s
Satan’s Workshop
. It would be the lead plane of the entire First Bomb Wing, which was sending almost two hundred Fortresses to the target that day.

General Travis then delivered a brief talk to the combat crews. They had a job to do, he told them, his manner calm and self-assured. Their job was to destroy Germany’s industrial muscle. It wasn’t going to be easy. When it came to their military duties, he expected them to maintain the highest standard of performance, both in the air and on the ground. He would lead many of the missions to Germany personally, and from up front. He said he planned to complete the same twenty-five-mission tour they were required to fly. From his demeanor, there didn’t appear to be the slightest doubt in his mind that he would make it through.

Although he had flown three missions as an observer since arriving in England less than two weeks earlier, he did not tell them that this would be the first combat mission he had ever led.

Sitting with the rest of the pilots at the briefing, Second Lieutenant Bud Klint, the twenty-four-year-old copilot of
Luscious Lady
, listened to the young general with rapt attention. To him, Travis looked like he had already been there and back, every inch a combat leader. At six feet five inches tall, he looked solid and manly, in the same mold as the movie star Gary Cooper.

Solid, manly, confident, brave, and determined were adjectives often used to describe Bob Travis throughout his military career. Some of his fellow officers, particularly those who had felt the sting of his sharp elbows as he climbed the promotion ladder, used other adjectives, such as ruthless and uncompromising. There was a seed of truth in each one. He was a complex man.

Robert Falligant Travis had been born in Savannah, Georgia, on the morning after Christmas in 1905. His father, Robert Jesse Travis, was a retired major general, and a descendant of Colonel William Travis, who was killed while commanding the Texas forces defending the Alamo in 1836.

Along with his younger brother and two sisters, Bob Travis had grown up in a loving and supportive family. Both parents believed strongly in the values of hard work, education, and personal discipline. Bob was both a good student and a model son. An all-around athlete, he was a superb squash player and expert skeet shooter.

After winning an appointment to West Point, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry in 1928 before winning his wings as a qualified army pilot. Once committed to aviation, he served in a variety of staff and operational positions until being permanently assigned to bombers in 1934.

To the men who served under him, he was a stickler for regulations and a man who displayed a fierce temper if his orders weren’t carried out to his satisfaction. Although a smoker himself, he was noted for walking the entire flight line of his training command with a measuring tape; anyone found smoking within fifty feet of an airplane was busted in rank.

Like General Ira Eaker, he enjoyed playing high-stakes poker. Unlike Eaker, Bob Travis preferred to play with junior officers. At his Gowen Field training command, he would often appear at the officers’ club when the games were in full swing, and politely ask the lieutenants around an open table if he could join them. He was never turned down. Whether he won or lost, he was always affable and polite.

To his friends, he was a model of Southern courtesy, especially around women. His wife, Frances Jane, was a superb helpmate, organizing the family moves to each new army post with efficiency and skill.

Bob Travis’s affable demeanor masked a burning desire to succeed. Success in the army was measured by promotions and combat decorations. Unfortunately, he couldn’t earn battle stars running a training command in Boise, Idaho.

Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he was promoted to group commander, and in September 1942, wing commander of a stateside training command. He put in for a combat assignment over and over again.

A year later, he finally received orders to take over the Forty-first Combat Wing of the Eighth Air Force. It was the plum job he had been yearning for. Bob Travis would be commanding three bomb groups in the air war over Germany. He planned to make the most of it.