Assignment to Hell (28 page)

Gable was serious about avoiding the limelight. When Bob Hope came to Polebrook for a USO show, Hope asked for “Rhett Butler” to stand up and take a bow. Gable never budged and the guys around him refused to give him up.
²⁰

“It was considered good politics as well as good public relations to get Gable an Air Medal,” Cronkite recalled. “So they picked five milk runs to the nearby coast of France, and he was decorated with all the hoopla that Air Force public relations could muster.”
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It’s true that the Eighth Air Force didn’t send Gable deep into the Reich, but his first mission was hardly a pushover. The plane got shot up and a shell narrowly missed wounding Gable.
²²

“Gable was a good guy,” Cronkite wrote. “I thought he was just a little self-conscious about that Air Medal. He had good reason to be, but he was living the role assigned to him and doing it as graciously as possible.”
²³

He may have been gracious to Cronkite, but Gable, traumatized by what he saw happening to fellow airmen, had some rough moments. “It’s murder up there,” he confided to a member of his film crew. “They’re falling like moths. Like dying moths.”
²⁴
While visiting a hospital full of wounded fliers, an overcome Gable threatened to pummel a doctor he felt wasn’t being sufficiently empathetic.
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The star’s presence wasn’t lost on the Hollywood-worshipping enemy in Berlin.
Reichsmarschall
Göring offered a $5,000 reward to any Luftwaffe
flier that shot down Gable’s plane. Gable worried that, were he ever captured, Hitler and Göring would turn him into a circus freak, parading him all over the Reich. “How could I hide this face?” Gable confided to a friend. “If the plane goes, I’ll just go with the son of a bitch.”
²⁶

Combat America
, Gable’s film, was supposed to help the Army Air Force recruit air gunners. But the AAF already had more than enough gunners by the time the film was ready for distribution in late ’43. The documentary contains some gritty combat footage and revealing interviews with gunners, but doesn’t come close to packing the wallop of Wyler’s
The Memphis Belle
.

J
IMMY
S
TEWART, TOO, ENLISTED AS
a private, just days after winning an Academy Award for his memorable role with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in
The Philadelphia Story
. Stewart, by then in his midthirties, had gotten a pilot’s license after graduating from Princeton and owned a little two-seater. Coaxed into B-17 school, he was lauded as a superior pilot and became an instructor. But Stewart began itching for combat duty; in the fall of ’43, the Army Air Force finally relented, again incurring Mayer’s wrath.

Ironically assigned to a B-24 Liberator unit, the 445th Bomb Group out of Tibenham, Stewart was dead set against publicity. For months he refused to pose for pictures and fought off an avalanche of interview requests. Only when the Eighth Air Force’s public relations officers pointed out that a little press attention would help the morale of squadron members did Stewart finally budge, allowing photographers and correspondents to cover a medal ceremony.

“I was reluctant to send a cameraman out in front of the line of men receiving awards and singling out Jimmy Stewart to photograph but I suspect that, in this case, he must have been a little proud and only tentatively reluctant to have his picture in the
Stars and Stripes
,” recalled Rooney. As Rooney studied Stewart’s face during the awards ceremony, he couldn’t help but think, “Those don’t look like lips that have kissed Lana Turner’s.”
Later in life Rooney wondered if thoughts of kissing Turner had ever come to Stewart, unbidden, while attacking the Reich.
²⁷

Lieutenant Colonel Stewart ended up flying twenty-one missions over enemy territory without ever losing a plane or a crew member and was promoted to operations officer for the 453rd Bomb Group, then made chief of staff for the Second Bomb Wing out of Hethel.

Stewart was so valued by crew members that on September 27, 1944, he was called back to Tibenham after his old unit absorbed the worst beating in the annals of American aerial warfare.

Twenty-five of thirty-five Liberators did not make it home from a mission over Kassel and Göttingen. After releasing their loads they were jumped by three of Göring’s
Sturmstaffeln
(“storm squadrons”), special units of heavily armored Fw 190s. Some survivors were in such deep shock that they couldn’t utter a word. Stewart intervened, quietly divided the men into small groups, and got them to share their grief—and discuss how such a debacle might be averted by future attackers.
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Stewart was “the kind of American that Americans like to think of as typical even though he was better than that,” Rooney wrote.
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“I
T WAS LIKE A DEATH
in the family every time a crew returned and found that friends in another B-17 or B-24 hadn’t made it,” Rooney remembered. “Back in their Nissen hut, they found empty bunks and silence where friends had been that morning. The wife, the girlfriend, the mother stared out from the picture next to the bunk. The guys were gone. In all probability dead or, at very best, prisoners. No one mentioned the empty spaces at the breakfast table next morning.”
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The tour of duty for bomber boys in ’43 was twenty-five missions; after that, at least in theory, they’d be rotated off duty or sent home. Many crew members kept track of their progress on barracks’ walls by marking each mission with a vertical line.

One day, Rooney was interviewing a young airman sitting on a bunk and spotted the markings behind him. Rooney congratulated him on having
completed seventeen missions. “You’re practically done,” Rooney smiled. “No,” the kid responded. “Those aren’t mine. Today was my third.”

“I didn’t have to ask about the man who had carved the seventeen marks,” Rooney wrote. “He never got back to carve the eighteenth.”
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At the Thurleigh airdrome, Rooney’s home base, American airmen “adopted” a three-year-old war orphan, nicknamed her Sweet Pea, and decorated the nose of a bomber with her painted palm print, hoping her mark would keep the plane safe.
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The bomber boys knew every guy who disappeared the way classmates in a small school know one another. “If you hear of someone who flew thirty-five or forty missions in a bomber, it was not from a base in the British Isles before D-Day,” Rooney wrote. “No one made it that far.”
³³
In one of his first columns, Hal Boyle told the story of a pilot in the Mediterranean Theater who had a recurring nightmare about landing on top of the Rock of Gibraltar—with brakes that had gone out.
³⁴

M
AINTAINING MORALE IN BOMBER CREWS
became so thorny that the Eighth Air Force took up the British Air Ministry on its offer to make the RAF’s rest-and-relaxation homes—known among the ranks as flak farms—available to American airmen. Homer Bigart filed a piece in late April ’43 on the R & R spot for officers and followed up seven weeks later with a description of the respite home for air gunners.

Censorship rules, of course, prevented Bigart from mentioning either location. But the Air Ministry had established flak farms at resorts and estates all over England: at Ebrington Manor in Gloucestershire; at Eynsham Hall near Whitney; at Phyllis Court near Henley on Thames; and at Moulsford Manor and Bucklands Hotel at Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
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Bigart’s eclectic knowledge and his gift for tart tongue-in-cheek observation were on full display in both articles.

“A rest home, with breakfast eggs, mullioned windows, tiled baths, central heating, golfing privileges, a butler named Bunting, and fishing rights in a stream mentioned favorably by the late Izaak Walton, has been requisitioned
by the Air Ministry and thrown open to tired pilots, copilots, navigators and bombardiers of the Eighth Air Force,” was his lede in the April 29 piece that got wide pickup beyond the
Herald Tribune
. The estate, wrote the reporter, who had just spent weeks hanging around director William Wyler, “resembles a Hollywood version of the country diggings of a strictly upper-class Mrs. Miniver.” Some of the estate’s relics dated from the time of King Ethelwulf, the monarch whom, Bigart informed readers, had “sired” Alfred the Great.

Its main house was “a Tudor residence of mellowed red brick, surmounted by five squat gables, ornamented by heavily-carved woodwork. The broad terrace along the southern front slopes gently to a chain of ponds, bordered by high clumps of rhododendron. Along the west slope are hothouses enclosing peach trees, fig trees and grape arbors and the usual rock garden.” Then, just to give his august portrayal a hint of American insouciance, Bigart slipped in: “For security reasons, there is no babbling brook.”

The place had been open since early January, but Eighth Air Force officers had been reluctant to use it because of its “unfortunate psychiatric connotation.” “‘Rest home,’ Bigart needled, “brought to mind long rows of metal beds, rocking chairs, and bearded medicos tapping guests on the knee to check their reflexes.” Disconcerting connotation or not, the AAF guys were taking full advantage. Some “rests” lasted as little as four days; others as long as two weeks.

There was only one regulation at flak farms—and it was strictly enforced. If any officer was caught talking shop, he was fined two shillings, sixpence.
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The same rule was theoretically in effect at the other RAF rest home Bigart wrote about, but this one was off-limits to officers. It was strictly for noncom air gunners. “These gunners may fight only a few hours a month. Their battle is short and sweet—but as deadly and vicious as any land engagement ever fought in Tunisia, New Guinea, or Guadalcanal,” Bigart told readers in mid-June ’43.
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Several airmen who had just survived a bloody June 13 mission to Kiel
and Bremen happened to check into the home on the day Bigart arrived. The B-17
Shackeroo
had barely made it back over the North Sea from German skies when it was ambushed by three Messerschmitts.

“[The enemy fighters] must have made a suicide pact,” a crew member told Bigart, “for they just didn’t care what happened. We nabbed two of the three on the first blast, but they got the Fortress on our left, then the survivor made three direct passes at [
Shackeroo
]. His guns opened up with three other jolts in the number one engine, setting it afire.”
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Twice more the enemy pilot attacked
Shackeroo
before a gunner got him, but the bomber was a goner. To lighten its load, the crew tossed out everything; the pilot took the machine down to wave-top level. Its engines were badly sputtering; the crew assumed the water crash position, moving into the radio compartment and piling their parachutes against the wall for extra padding.

“They were prone on the floor, each man’s head on another’s chest, legs straddled for the sickening jolt of a water landing,” Bigart wrote.
Shackeroo
smashed into the sea at 100 miles per hour.

The pilot and copilot dove out the port cockpit window; the rest of the men plunged out the radio room hatch. “They were a green crew,” Bigart wrote, “but they behaved like veterans,” prying loose two rafts and propping two wounded men, the bombardier and the navigator, on the wing while they got the dinghies in place. Just before the plane sank, they managed to get the wounded officers onto a raft. The men of the
Shackeroo
were lucky: A B-17 flying nearby saw them going into the water and dropped a rubber skiff and an emergency radio, all the while dispatching an SOS to Britain.

It was midday and a strong current was pushing them back toward the German coast. Two planes appeared overhead; for a moment they thought they were a pair of Spitfires. But they were enemy Focke-Wulfs that must not have spotted them. By six o’clock the sea started running very heavy; the men had to bail furiously just to keep the rafts afloat. “The sunlight waned,” Bigart wrote, “and the penetrating cold of the North Sea felt like an Arctic blast.”

Teeth chattering, the men continued to drift. Sometime after nine p.m.,
they heard a distant drone. Soon they recognized the silhouettes of two RAF Boston bombers. The men shot up a red flare.

“One bomber dipped its wing and began hovering around like an anxious hen,” Bigart wrote. “The other turned sharply and headed into the sun.”

Another nerve-racking thirty minutes passed with the RAF bomber treading the airspace overhead, intermittently dropping smoke flares so it could keep track of the rafts’ whereabouts. Had it not been within a few days of the summer solstice, the men of the
Shackeroo
would never have been rescued. There was just a flicker of sunlight left when the men heard the whirring of an approaching British torpedo boat.

The
Shackeroo
wasn’t the only B-17 to go down in the North Sea following the Kiel-Bremen attack. A less fortunate Fort crash-landed a few miles west of
Shackeroo
’s position. Two of its crew members drowned before the survivors were pulled out of the water by an RAF seaplane.
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Kiel-Bremen was the bloodiest American raid of the war to date. The Eighth Air Force lost twenty-six of sixty bombers that day: 260 men gone in a matter of minutes. It was just the third day of the combined bombing offensive with the Brits; already losses were staggering, yet unescorted missions continued unabated through that summer.
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F
OLLOWING THE
N
AZI SURRENDER IN
North Africa, Joe Liebling spent five fitful months in the States. He lived at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in the Village, tracking down strands of the Mollie story and finishing the rest of his Torch articles for what became
The Road Back to Paris
. He also tried to figure out what to do with his estranged wife, Ann, who continued to require periodic hospitalization.