Combat Crew (22 page)

“Ball to crew — 765 is gone! No chutes. Damn!”

After a few minutes the Ball continued. “Six fighters tore her apart. Looked to me like they had time to jump.”

Our faithful old aerial warhorse was finished! As she rolled back within my sight far below, I felt stabs of anguish. It was like losing an old friend with whom I had shared both escapades and harrowing experiences.

A fighter zoomed up from below and cut loose at us with cannon fire.

“Tail to Copilot, a twenty-millimeter shell damn near got me. Knocked off one of my boots an' crashed on through without exploding.”

Aircraft
Tinker Toy
moved into the space that 765 had been holding.

“Tail to crew, look at
Tinker Toy
. She's riddled from the ball to the tail.”

“That's
Tinker Toy
— same old thing!” said the bombardier.

“Copilot to crew, two fighters comin' in eleven o'clock high. Let 'em have it Turret! Hey, Navigator, blast the bastards.”

They were going for
Tinker Toy
and hit her dead center of the cockpit. I saw a small explosion.

Counce called, “They got the pilot! Copilot is hit, too. The engineer is trying to move the pilot's body so he can get in his seat.”

“Turret to Copilot, I think I just saw the engineer put
Tinker Toy
on autopilot until he can try to get control.”

Kels motioned for Gleichauf to switch over to intercom.

“What is it?”

“Keep your eye on
Tinker Toy
. Pilot is dead. Engineer put her on autopilot. He's trying to move the pilot's body. The copilot is slumped in his seat — can't tell how bad he's wounded.”

“We'll watch her — don't want a collision with
Tinker Toy
.”

The fighters kept striking her. One wing was badly torn and an engine cowling knocked off. But she flew on. In my imagination I could hear her taunting the fighters: “Yah! Yah! You Kraut pimps! You can't knock me down. Go ahead! Try it! You square-headed bastards ain't good enough to get me. Yah! Yah! Yah! Go ahead and try to shoot me down! Yah! Yah!”

The wounded copilot raised up in his seat momentarily and helped the engineer with a control then collapsed again. How could the two men in the cockpit withstand that awful blast of super-frigid wind blowing squarely in their faces without windshields?

Suddenly I realized my left hand was so cold it was becoming numb. That was normally a sign that the electric glove had burned out. I looked down at the hand. It was bare except for a thin silk glove. Where was the electric glove? Oh! I had removed it to wire the turret clutch in place. At thirty-five below, I was handling the metal gun controls with a hand covered only with the light silk glove normally worn under the electric outer glove. Impossible! My hand would have frozen solidly in a very few minutes. Yet, I was looking at the numb hand and the electric glove was resting where I took it off much earlier — before we reached the target. There was only one explanation: In the excitement of the action my blood pressure had gone sky high, pushing a large quantity of warm blood to the hands which replaced some of the lost heat.

When the fighter attacks finally faded out my relief was quickly punctured by the antics of number-three engine. It suddenly unfeathered and began to revolve out of control. It required engine oil pressure to hold a propeller in a feathered position with the blades flat to the wind. If the oil pressure failed, the blades would shift to an angle, and the strong wind would rotate them. That was called windmilling, and with no means of control, the propeller revolutions would rev up to fantastic speeds. With no lubrication the engine would get hotter and hotter until it became red hot. The danger was that it might tear off of the aircraft with severe damage. The engine revved up and up beyond the twenty-five hundred R.P.M. red-line limit. I watched with a sinking feeling as it shot up to three thousand. Then, to my immense relief, and for no reason that I could think of at the moment, it began to level off, then started slowing down. Eventually it stopped and resumed a feathered position again.

“Turret to Ball.”

“Go ahead, Turret.”

“Check number three again for an oil leak.”

“No oil leak from number-three engine.”

“Pilot to Turret. What's wrong with number-three prop?”

“Not sure. Could be a fracture in the oil pressure system in the prop hub that opens and closes. Ball says no oil leak down below so far. If it starts squirting out oil we'll have a runaway prop.”

“Turret to Waist. Jim, how does this sound to you?”

“Don't see how it could be anything but a pressure leak.”

Five minutes later the process repeated. All of the way back to Ridgewell that propeller would race up to three thousand revolutions and, having made its point, return to zero. Each time the speed zoomed upward my blood pressure went up with it.

We could have caught fighters again, but fortunately nothing else happened.
Tinker Toy
had serious landing problems but ended with nothing worse than slipping off the runway into sticky mud. A crowd gathered quickly to see what new horrors she had thrown at her crew. And again the question: Was she really a jinx ship? For the men who flew combat raids in her it was more than a wartime superstition. It was a series of nightmares! That day her nose was blown off, both windshields were wiped out, one wing was battered, and she was heavily damaged from the radio to the tail. The cockpit was splattered with blood, bits of flesh, and hair — a horrible sight to see.

When I climbed out of 755 the crew chief was waiting. “You had better put in a call for some sheet metal men, you will probably need two new engines, the radio is shattered, you will need two windshields, and one wing flap. The tail is also damaged. I think all of the main fuel tanks will have to be replaced because they are bound to be perforated …”

The 381st sent out twenty-one ships and lost seven. The 100th had another bad day and lost eight. The total loss for the raid was thirty-seven Forts. Of the returning aircraft, seventy-five percent were damaged.

As soon as we were on the ground, I asked Gleichauf and Purus about the huge mass of shining particles I saw near the target. It turned out to he a new way to confuse the enemy radar by dumping out bales of thin aluminum foil fragments. The light pieces floating in the air confused the enemy radar by appearing to be aircraft. What I saw was a compressed bale of foil that had not yet begun to break up. Later on it was thrown in bulk from several aircraft regularly and was called “chaff.”

After the mission I hit the sack, weary, exhausted, and in a state of confusion. What did the message I received on the way to Bremen mean and where did it come from? I never expected to get an answer to a prayer, if indeed, that is what had happened. There was absolutely no doubt but that I did get a communication. The question was, “Where did it come from?” A simplistic answer would have been straight from God. I could have accepted that except it seemed too simple — too easy to draw such a conclusion as fact. I tried to think about it in rational channels, although I realized that at some point any religion steps beyond logic or reason into mystical or metaphysical phenomena. The danger faced each mission made me ready to turn to any spiritual assistance that was readily available, but I needed to separate the real from the dross that had accumulated in my mind.