To Kingdom Come (24 page)

Entrèpagny, France
Sergeant Olen “Reb” Grant
1700

He regained consciousness in what appeared to be a cellar, with low whitewashed stone walls. It was very cold. He realized he was naked and wondered what had happened to his blue heat suit and warm leather flight jacket.

He was lying on a white metal table, and there were people standing around him. They were talking to one another in loud voices, but he didn’t understand what they were saying. He faded out again.

Champigny, France
Second Lieutenant Demetrios Karnezis
1500

The Greek had hobbled through dense forest for more than an hour, his coccyx in continuous pain as he meandered slowly westward. When he came to the far edge of the forest, he paused to observe the landscape ahead of him.

It was open farmland. The crop had already been harvested. There was a single farmhouse in the distance, maybe five hundred yards away. Its roof was shining in the late afternoon sun. Next to the house was a barn and several other outbuildings, all connected by low stone walls.

He waited in the silence of the trees and watched, but no one went in or out. He saw no farm animals or vehicles. There was no activity of any sort, which finally gave him the confidence to approach the house.

It was very quiet in the packed-earth courtyard behind the stone walls. No faces appeared in the windows. He slowly walked to the nearest door. Without knocking, he turned the handle and pushed it open.

He was looking into a stone-floored kitchen. A woman of about forty was standing by the sink under the window. A girl, maybe seventeen, was sitting at the kitchen table. Apparently, they had just finished a meal. There was bread and a bowl of fruit on the table.

They both stared at him, seemingly awestruck. Finally, the woman motioned him to come inside. As soon as he closed the door, both of them began speaking to him in French. He couldn’t understand what they were saying.

The girl offered him the bowl of fruit and he took a piece and ate it. The woman poured him a glass of red wine. He shook his head and pointed at the sink. Then he saw there was no running water.

He haltingly tried to explain that he was an American pilot, but they already seemed to have figured that out. Seeing him hobble across the stone floor, the woman realized he had injured his back and found cushions for one of the kitchen chairs. After he sat down, she brought over a hand mirror.

When he looked at himself, the Greek was forced to laugh out loud. Most of his face was flash-burned and looked like it was covered with charcoal. When he rubbed his upper lip, his carefully nurtured Errol Flynn mustache fell away in flakes of black dust.

He began to wonder if she would turn him over to the Germans as soon as she had the chance. Then the woman removed a jar of ointment from one of the kitchen cupboards and began applying it to his burned hands. There was kindness and sympathy in her eyes. He decided to trust her.

A few miles away from the farmhouse, the Greek’s copilot, Jack George, was walking along a macadam country road, still dressed in his flight suit and Mae West. He was distraught at the murder of the crew’s two waist gunners by the strafing fighter, and no longer cared what happened to him. A car came up behind him, slowed down, and stopped. Two men were inside. One of them motioned him over.

Eventide

Eighth Air Force Bomber Command
High Wycombe Abbey
Brigadier General Frederick Anderson, Jr., Commanding
1830

W
hat was he supposed to do now?

The thirty-eight-year-old Fred Anderson was career army, a graduate of West Point, and mindful of the potential missteps that could break a man’s career on the path to high command.

His immediate superior was Ira Eaker, and Anderson owed him plenty. He had been a staff colonel when Eaker asked him to join the Eighth. Anderson hadn’t even served as a group commander before being given command of an entire wing.

Now he had overall command of the Eighth’s bombers, receiving the promotion two months earlier when Arnold demanded that Eaker fire Anderson’s predecessor for failing to be aggressive enough in the bombing campaign.

Anderson had witnessed all the vitriolic cables passing back and forth between Eaker and Arnold during the period when they seemed to spend more time fighting one another than the Germans.

He had helped Ira Eaker plan the new campaign against strategic targets inside Germany. After Schweinfurt, Eaker had been reluctant to continue it without long-range fighters. Anderson agreed with him. Now they had more evidence of the rightness of their position.

But Hap Arnold ran the corporation.

In about an hour, Anderson would be joining both generals at Claridge’s for the dinner in Arnold’s honor. At some point, he knew that General Arnold would ask him for the results of the Stuttgart mission. As head of bomber command, it would be his job to provide the details.

He had already sent the preliminary summary of the results to Ira Eaker at his headquarters at Bushy Park, about fifteen miles southwest of London. After reading the report, Ira would hopefully give him some guidance on what to tell Hap Arnold.

There was no way to sugarcoat this one.

Of the ninety-one operations undertaken by the Eighth Air Force since the commencement of daylight precision bombing in 1942, Stuttgart was the worst failure of the war.

Based on the interrogation reports from all sixteen groups, not one of the bombers that attacked Stuttgart had claimed to hit one of the intended targets specified in the operational orders, principally the Robert Bosch factory complex and the SKF instrument-bearing plants.

Of the 338 Fortresses that had taken off from the sixteen air bases that morning, 44 of them, nearly 15 percent of the entire force, had aborted the mission before reaching the French coast due to reported mechanical and instrument failures. Another 32 bombers had crossed the enemy coast but failed to reach the target due to other causes, including reported bad weather or navigation error.

Of the 262 Fortresses that had reached Stuttgart, nearly 50 were still unaccounted for. Although a handful of them had landed at airfields where they were still unable to make contact, at least 45 had been confirmed as shot down or otherwise lost.

Forty-five bombers out of 262 meant a loss of more than 17 percent, the highest of any mission yet undertaken in the war, even worse than Schweinfurt.

But they had hit the target at Schweinfurt.

Eleven B-17s had been destroyed in the 388th Bomb Group alone. Its entire low squadron of six Fortresses had been wiped out
.
The 92nd group had lost seven bombers, the 305th and the 384th, five each.

A dozen Fortresses had been forced to ditch in the English Channel when they ran out of gas. Fourteen had landed at small RAF fighter strips along the coast, the first fields they had found after crossing the coast. Two were wrecked in crash-landings when the pilots ran out of gas in search of an airfield. Another five Fortresses had apparently attempted landings in Switzerland.

By any description, it was a disaster.

If even a few of the Fortresses in the two bomb wings had managed to hit the principal targets, he could at least make a case that the heavy losses were worth it. In truth, the majority of the B-17s had bombed “targets of opportunity,” which in many instances were identified as “a forest” or “a farm community.” Most of the bomber crews had no idea where their bombs went.

The one positive element of the report was that the crews claimed to have destroyed ninety-eight enemy fighters along with twenty probable kills. It was a good result, although fighter claims had to be discounted because more than one machine gunner would usually be firing at the same fighter at the time it was destroyed, and they would both naturally claim to have shot it down.

Before the dinner at Claridge’s, Anderson needed guidance on how to characterize the mission results to General Arnold. It was no exaggeration to conclude that his future might be on the line.

Entrépagny, France
384th Bomb Group
Second Lieutenant James Armstrong
1830

It was damp and cold in the briar patch.

While lying there, he considered a number of different strategies for making his escape from occupied France. The problem was that all of them required an ability to walk.

That didn’t seem to be a likely possibility anytime soon. Since making his hard parachute landing, Jimmy’s right ankle had swollen to twice its normal size. He could only hope it wasn’t broken. When he had tried to stand up after hitting the ground, he fell over on his face.

Yankee Raider
had gone down only a mile or two away from where he had landed. He knew that after the Germans searched the plane, they would immediately start looking for the missing crew members. He needed a place to hide until the pain in his ankle receded enough for him to walk on it.

Next to the field where he had landed was a small copse of woods. He had crawled to it on his hands and knees. Near the edge of the tree line, he had spied a massive thicket of briars, intertwining vines and stems that rose almost five feet high and extended a hundred feet into the woods. He doubted that the Germans would be thrilled about going in there to search for him. He could only hope they didn’t have bloodhounds. The dogs wouldn’t care.

As he began to wriggle and burrow into the briar patch, he remembered that this was Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Back in his hometown of Bradenton, Florida, they celebrated the holiday with picnics and an air show.

Well, he had participated in an air show all right, but this was no picnic. He didn’t have any food, and he kept being stuck with painful pricks from the nettles and thorns inside the patch.

It took a long time for the six-foot, two-hundred-pound pilot to penetrate halfway in. He finally stopped to take stock of his situation. He was bareheaded, wearing a leather A-2 jacket over woolen trousers, khaki uniform blouse, and high-top shoes. He hadn’t bothered to bring his army-issue Colt .45.

Among the few things he found of possible use in his pockets were the little compass he carried on each mission and a small escape handkerchief on which was printed a map of France. He knew he was northwest of Paris. If he walked far enough southeast he would hit the Seine River and could follow it straight into Paris. Paris was supposed to be full of resistance fighters.

Even if the pain in his ankle subsided, he was worried about drawing unwanted attention after starting the journey. He knew his face was badly swollen from the burning cockpit. That would be sure to attract notice, along with his badly burned hands. He would need help from somebody.

Above all, Jimmy didn’t want to be captured and spend the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. The way things were going, the war was bound to go on for a long time.

Through the rest of the afternoon, he lay quietly in his lair and waited. Aside from birdsong, he couldn’t hear a thing. No German search parties, no bloodhounds, no vehicles, no human voices.

As night fell, he became hungry and thirsty. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since around five that morning back at the officers’ mess in Grafton Underwood. He wished he was back there now, sinking his teeth into a ham sandwich and enjoying a glass of beer. He thought about leaving the lair to try to find water, but then became worried he might not find his way back.

The moon came up, allowing him to see the dense assemblage of vines and stems surrounding him in the thicket. His ankle was hurting worse than ever, and the damp cold made his burns ache. He seemed to be a magnet for spiders, ants, and other tiny creatures, but they didn’t bother him.

In the morning he knew he had to find water. He hoped he would be able to walk far enough on his bad ankle to reach it. There was nothing else he could do for now but rest. He fell into a fitful sleep.

London, England
Claridge’s Hotel
General Henry Arnold
2200

The mahogany table was fifty feet long. Its starched, white damask linen tablecloth was covered with an array of Claridge’s best china and flatware. Sterling silver candelabras threw off warm cones of candlelight every five feet along the spine of the table.

The elegant supper had been absolutely splendid, with each course prepared by Claridge’s superb chefs with the provisions supplied by the dog robbers on Eaker’s headquarters staff.

The guest of honor appeared to be enjoying himself immensely.

In the spirit of Allied cooperation, the thirty-six British and American guests were intermingled. No French commanders had been invited. Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal sat on Arnold’s right, with Ira Eaker on Arnold’s left. Marshal of the RAF: the Viscount Hugh Trenchard and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris were also close by. He had easy access to his closest intimates, both English and American.

Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory was sitting at the end of the opposite side of the table next to Brigadier General Fred Anderson. Leigh-Mallory had just been chosen to become commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, which included both RAF units and the U.S. Ninth Air Force. He was immensely proud to be commanding American medium bombers.

Leigh-Mallory found himself increasingly charmed with Arnold, whose self-deprecating personal style was in stark contrast to some of Leigh-Mallory’s English colleagues. He thought Arnold was a “grand” raconteur and storyteller.

Sitting next to him, Fred Anderson was nervously waiting for Hap Arnold to ask him about the Stuttgart mission. When the question came his way, he was ready with his answer, but there was at least some hope that the subject wouldn’t even come up. Arnold and the senior commanders were covering far more important strategic issues. Maybe the Stuttgart mission would be forgotten under their weight.