The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (10 page)

Of the seventeen original crews that began training when Kay’s crew did in May 1944, only six finished the war. In Europe, his 465th Bomb Group lost thirty-five crews. His was the only one of the four crews that arrived in Europe on July 22, 1944, to finish. Of the other three bombardiers, two were killed in action and the other became a POW.18 Lt. Walter Baskin had hoped to be a fighter pilot, but to his dismay was assigned to a B-24 as a co-pilot. Beginning in January 1944, he trained at the air base in Blythe, California. His letters home reveal how tough it was.  January 3: “We have been flying this B-24 day and night since we got here and they keep us pretty busy. It’s 9:00 P.M. now and I have to go to Link from 10 to 11 tonight. Then get up pretty early in the morning so you can see that sleep doesn’t mean anything around here. All you do is work and if you don’t work there’s nothing else to do so you just work.”

The AAF did not have enough B-24s for the demand. February 10: “When we are scheduled to fly we have trouble getting an airplane that will fly. There are plenty of planes here, but they are old and over half of them are always on the ramp being repaired. We had a nice scheduled cross country flight all fixed up to go to Santa Maria yesterday, but one of the engines was throwing so much oil that we wouldn’t take it up.” Still the crew kept busy. February 11: “Every third day we go twenty hours straight and the two days in between are seventeen hours long. . . .We fly every day and sometimes we don’t get home ‘til 3 A.M.  but we still get up and go again. I believe combat will be a rest after this.” On March 2 he wrote: “We are winding up our training here and the last part will be almost entirely devoted to formation flying. When you get to combat if you can’t fly formation you are just a ‘dead duck.’” As Consolidated, Ford, and the other makers of the plane began to turn them out in record numbers, Baskin’s craft improved. He was glad to tell his parents, “This ship is brand-new and has just twenty-eight hours of flying time on it. It is going to carry us a long way and then bring us back, so it gets first consideration in all cases.” He liked his fellow officers. Baskin came from a Mississippi cotton farm. The pilot, Lt. Russell Paulnock, was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner. Baskin described Paulnock as “a good boy and a cautious pilot.” The bombardier was Lt.  James Bartels, from Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a preacher. He was married and his wife was at Blythe with him. The crew had been practicing dropping bombs and Bartels was “a right good bombardier.” The navigator was Lt. Earl Barseth. “He is from New England and a typical Yankee,” Baskin wrote.  In mid-March, Baskin’s B-24 made cross-country trips. He wrote his parents on March 13, more or less unbelievingly, “Last week we flew over the Grand Canyon and Boulder Dam and that is really a beautiful sight. We flew for hours over stretches of desert and waste land wherenobody lives.” In one letter, Baskin declared that “this B-24 is not my dream ship,” but he confessed “it certainly packs a wallop.”

In April, his training completed, Baskin joined McGovern at Lincoln, Nebraska, where his plane was weathered in for a few days. Then in the middle of the month the sky was clear, so it was off to Florida in formation with his bomber group on its way to Europe. Co-pilot Baskin was flying when the plane passed over his farm near Vaiden, Mississippi. Baskin pealed his Liberator out of formation and buzzed the place. He scared the wits out of all the chickens, cows, pigs, and mules and saw his dad standing in the backyard, puffing on his pipe, watching.  Then he buzzed his school, practically at window level, to give Bobby, his little brother, a big hello. Bobby, hearing the plane roar, jumped up from his desk saying, “That’s my brother,” and ran out to the playground to wave goodbye to his big brother as Baskin flew off on his way to combat. The chickens didn’t lay and the cows went dry for a week, and Bobby got suspended from school.  For Baskin it was fun, but it wasn’t like being the pilot of a fighter airplane.  As he wrote his parents, “This co-pilot job is not what I was raised to be.”19 Ken Barmore had his first look at and ride in a B-24 on December 30, 1943. He was a co-pilot. His pilot was Lt. Jim Connelly, from Texas, “who was just the greatest guy.” Riding with them at first was an instructor who was an American but had joined the Royal Air Force before Pearl Harbor and flew a Wellington bomber over Europe. After America entered the war he came home to join the AAF, and Barmore felt “we were real lucky to have him, he was a neat guy.” To Barmore’s discomfort, he didn’t get to do much of the flying: “They just threw the co-pilots in the right seat and learn as you can.” He tried and tried again to move over to the left seat, but he had not gone through transition school so his chances “were practically nil.” He did a lot of formation flying and bombing practice. “I got to feeling pretty comfortable in the airplane” but Connelly would seldom allow him to take off or land.20 Radioman Sgt. Robert Hammer met his fellow crew members at Mitchell Field, New York, then went with them to Georgia for flight training on their B-24.  Formation flying for his pilot and indeed all the other pilots was difficult.  Much of the air time was devoted to learning how to do it, despite a high accident rate. Three B-24s were lost during practice, killing thirty men. On one occasion while flying in formation, Hammer was sending blinking signals from the waist window to the radio operator in the plane to the right. He had just signed off when another plane was sucked into that plane by the prop wash. It tore the fuselage in half. Hammer saw men, including the radio operator he had just communicated with, flying in one direction and their parachutes in another. All ten were killed, but the other plane managed to land safely.  After Hammer’s plane landed, and just before debriefing, his pilot came up to him with tears in his eyes. He asked if Hammer didn’t think they were making the planes fly too close together. After the debriefing his pilot was grounded for his emotional response. Other men were lost, including the originally assigned navigator, who took the plane into a gunnery area on the East Coast on a night mission. Hammer commented, “We had been shot at before even getting out of the States.” With the replacements, the crew flew to New Hampshire, got a new B-24, and flew it to Gander Field, Newfoundland, then off to Europe.21 Sgt. Howard Goodner, a radioman, was sent to Buckley Field, Colorado, to be assigned to a crew. There he took refresher courses in communications, target identification, and first aid, but they were mainly to kill time. In June 1944, his orders arrived, sending him to Westover Field, near Springfield, Massachusetts, a long train trip. There he met his fellow crew members.  Goodner’s pilot was Lt. Richard Farrington, from St. Louis, a tall man who exuded self-confidence. Farrington had enlisted when he was nineteen years old and had not yet reached twenty-one. The co-pilot, Lt. Jack Regan, was twenty.  From Queens in New York City, he was nicknamed Abe because of his deep voice and uncanny resemblance to the young, beardless Lincoln. The bombardier, Lt. Chris Manners from Pittsburgh, was twenty-three. The sergeants came from all over and ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-eight. Eighteen-year-old Albert Seraydarian, an Armenian-American, was from Brooklyn. His “dem’s” and “dose’s” and other Brooklynese were so thick the southern-born Goodner could barely understand him. His nickname, unsurprisingly, was “Brooklyn.” Another gunner was eighteen-year-old Jack Brennan from Cliffside Park, New Jersey. The nose gunner was Harry Gregorian, like Seraydarian an Armenian-American, but from Detroit.  The flight engineer, Jerome Barrett, twenty years old, came from New York City.  His father owned a chemical company that occupied two entire floors of Rockefeller Center and his next-door neighbor was Broadway star Ethel Merman.  Goodner liked him at once - the two boys, one from Central Park West, the other from Cleveland, Tennessee, hit it off at once. Bob Peterson, the ball turret gunner, was the “old man,” married with two kids.  In this way Americans from all over the country, from far different backgrounds, got to know one another. For every one of them, as for McGovern and his crew, or Baskin and his, or Barmore and his, it was a broadening experience. As was the war, which had taken them to various parts of the United States in travels most of them never thought they would have, and was about to take them off to Europe.22 Except for the pilot and co-pilot, most members of the crew had never before been in a B-24, and they had much to learn. The crews found that just entering their B-24 was difficult. The bombardier, navigator, and nose turret gunner were forced to squat down, almost on hands and knees, and sidle up to their stations through the nose-wheel well of the ship. Inside, the three men had to squeeze themselves into a cramped compartment. The bombardier squatted on a small seat right behind the gunner, where he hunched over the bombsight or simply sat on the floor. The navigator sat at a tiny retractable stool, really too small to sit on, with the navigator’s table holding his charts in front. It was little more than a thin shelf on the bulkhead that separated the nose from the flight deck. At eye level, he could see the feet of the pilot and co-pilot.  The other crew members entered the plane by crawling up through the open bomb bay doors, about three feet off the ground. Once inside they would stand upright, step onto the narrow catwalk, then move forward onto the flight deck or back into the waist. The radioman sat at a small desk facing his radio sets, just behind and below the co-pilot. The engineer stood between the pilot and co-pilot at takeoff, helping to monitor the engine and fuel gauges. In the air he took his position behind the pilot and just across from the radioman. When required, he climbed into the top turret, where he stood, his feet on a metal bar inches above the radioman’s head.

The waist gunner, the ball turret gunner, and the tail gunner used the catwalk to get to their positions. The tail gunner, standing on a tiny platform, slipped his legs into the turret. There was not enough room for him to wear his parachute. The waist gunner - two before mid-1944, one thereafter as the danger from enemy fighter planes diminished - stood. At altitude the bitterly cold wind howled through the open windows of the waist, making this position and that of the ball and tail turret gunners miserable, covering them and their guns with a thin veil of frost.

The ball turret was, as McGovern said, the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the plane. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position. They were suspended beneath the plane, staring down between their knees at the earth.  Although all ball turret gunners were small, few of them had enough room to wear a parachute. If a bailout was necessary, they relied on the waist gunner to engage the hydraulic system to raise the turret and help them out and into their parachutes. That is what is called trust.

Adding to the extreme discomfort, the B-24 was not pressurized and at above 10,000 feet the men had to wear their ill-fitting rubber oxygen masks for hours at a time. They wore electrically heated flight suits, plugged into rheostats, but when the system shorted out or was damaged the suits were useless. Thus the men wore in addition layers of bulky clothing, which made movement within the claustrophobic aircraft even more awkward and agonizingly slow.  At all AAF bases where B-24s were involved in the training, the pace was intense, the practice flying seemed endless. Most dangerous was formation flying at night. Sergeant Goodner told his parents, “The B-24s are nice ships, but we lose a lot of them. Since I got here we have lost seven ships.” Once when the squadron commander of a night flight, a veteran of thirty-five missions over Germany, called out to the pilots in the formation,”Close it up, close it up,” Lieutenant Farrington edged his plane closer and closer. Goodner heard the waist gunner mutter on the intercom, “Jesus, I can shake hands with their tail gunner now.”23 A week after arriving in Lincoln, McGovern met his crew. His beard and mustache were just getting started. He was worried about “whether or not I could convince the crew that they were safe in the hands of a twenty-one-year-old pilot.”24 His co-pilot, Ralph “Bill” Rounds, wanted to be a fighter pilot. “Everything about the guy said fighter pilot,” one of his friends recalled.25 But the AAF decided against it and washed him out of fighter pilot training. His superiors told him that if he wanted to fly it would be as a co-pilot on a B-24. He took the option.

At first, McGovern was a bit concerned, because when Rounds had the controls “he’d try to fly that B-24 like a fighter plane. He’d whip it around and the crew was scared to death of him.” But as the practice runs went forward, McGovern came to have great respect for his ability, because Rounds became “a very good formation flyer - he could tuck that wing right in there and just hold it.”

On the ground, McGovern discovered just how different the two men were in their personalities. “He was a clown if there ever was one,” McGovern said of Rounds.  “You couldn’t be around him without laughing.” Rounds was a rollicking, fun-loving adventurer, with an eye for the women. McGovern marveled at the speed with which he “could move from the air base to the business of heavy romance with total strangers.” He would listen to Rounds’s accounts of his “spectacular multiple achievements in a single evening that were vastly beyond my area of experience.”

Once they were in a car in town, with Rounds driving and McGovern in the backseat. Rounds spotted two young women and immediately opened the front door and jumped out of the car in pursuit. He forgot to put on the hand brake and the car continued rolling down the street. McGovern climbed into the driver’s seat and narrowly averted hitting a parked truck. By the time he got the car stopped, “Bill was back with a girl on each arm.”26 Despite their divergent personalities, the two men would be living together, fighting together, and it was critical that they like and respect each other.  They did. Rounds said later that “I was very pleased with everybody when our crew made up, but George was kind of a big daddy, a big brother type.” Rounds got to know Eleanor. McGovern called her “Bunny,” he remembered - a temporary nickname - and Rounds thought “she was just a slick little gal. We just all loved Eleanor.” He was aware of their differences. “I was a single guy and sort of out on the prowl,” he said. “George was never one to put a damper on a party, but I never saw him drink much.” On June 27, he wrote his parents, “McGovern’s a very nice, refined, quiet man and I know that we will make a fine team.”27 On September 1, 1944, McGovern also wrote to Rounds’s parents. As a reassuring note, he opened, “Scarcely a day goes by that Bill doesn’t quote his dad on some subject, or voice an opinion of his mother’s.” Continuing, he admitted “we were all very green when we first started out here. . . .We are working with a great bunch of boys.