Combat Crew (19 page)

A gunner who wore size thirty-eight did not make it back from the mission and my blouse problem was solved. It was an excellent fit and I had a full uniform again. I hoped the unfortunate man got out of the ship in time.
¹¹

When the combat action slowed down, the 381st resumed their endless classes, not only because the information might be useful, but also to fill the vacuum between raids. The aircraft recognition classes were a matter of repetition. Pictures showing the silhouettes from different angles of vision of all the enemy aircraft we were expected to see would be flashed on and off of the screen. In time we came to recognize an aircraft at a distance the same way we recognized a Ford or Chevrolet without conscious thought.

The prisoner-of-war classes made a lasting impression on my mind. I can recall the lecturer saying something like the following: “Never resist an armed soldier because he is looking for an excuse to kill you after what you are doing to the cities of his country. German civilians are worse than the soldiers. They have been known to shoot men parachuting down. German soldiers will follow the prisoner-of-war rules of the Geneva Convention. So if you have a choice, surrender to soldiers rather than to civilians. If you are captured, your orders are to tell the captors your name, rank, and serial number and nothing else. Give the enemy no other information no matter how trivial it may sound to you. Your second order is to attempt to escape if you can. Don't do anything foolish. Remember that as a prisoner of war you are costing the enemy food, housing, materials, and manpower. Dead, you cost the Germans nothing. You will be questioned to extract whatever information they can get out of you. The Germans are skillful at interrogation. You might be ushered into a comfortable office where a smiling officer offers you a cigarette and a chair. He might have a glass of beer brought in. There could be small talk about the U.S. Perhaps the officer has visited our country. This could go on until he thinks you are disarmed. Then the questions will get closer and closer to what he is probing for. If you are not careful, you will spill information the enemy can use to put together a better picture of what we are doing and how we are doing it …”

Sometimes the lecturer was an escapee from a prison camp and we listened with intense interest. “Your third order is to obey the orders of the enemy as long as they do not aid the enemy war effort. You will refuse to work in a war plant or to do anything that will work against your country. You have little to fear from the German soldiers in the way of physical abuse. No matter what you have heard, we have no confirmed cases of torture of American or English soldiers. Herr Hitler still feels he is going to win this war, and hopes to create a working relationship with the U.S. and England after the war.

“Your fourth order is that you will be under the command of the senior Allied officer in your prison camp. The enemy will issue most of their directions through him. Never wear or carry anything in clothes or equipment that is not definitely a military issue. If the enemy finds anything on your person other than military or aircraft paraphernalia, you might be considered a spy or a saboteur. If they suspected you were an agent, you would be turned over to the Gestapo, and rest assured that the Geneva rules would not apply. They would put you through torture to extract useful information …”

When a four-day pass was available we always made a strenuous effort to get into London early enough to find a hotel room. My favorite place was “Prince's Garden,” the site of the Eagle Squadron Club of Americans who served with the R.A.F. before the U.S. was drawn into the struggle. It was located far enough away from the beaten path of soldiers on leave that rooms were usually available up to mid-afternoon.

One night in London I bumped into Johnny Graves in a bar near Trafalgar Square. He joined me at Sheppard Field that day when a few of us were conned into volunteering for aerial gunnery. We were together at the Boeing Aircraft Engineering School, at the Las Vegas Gunnery School, and the various training bases where combat crews were put together and developed. I was struck immediately by the change that had taken place in Johnny since I had last seen him. The look in his eyes and the lines tightly drawn across a face too young for such lines told me he had been through some harrowing experiences. This is what he told me: “We were badly damaged and had no chance to make it across the North Sea. The radio operator got in touch with Air-Sea Rescue, and as we headed down to ditch, there was enough power left to control the ship. We hit hard and bounced some before settling. Two of us were out real fast and got the rafts launched, and managed to cut loose before the ship sank. Right quick I saw we were in trouble 'cause the raft I was in began to deflate. There was a leak, either a defect in the raft or some battle damage. I got the hand pump going and me and one of the waist gunners kept that raft inflated. It was almost dark when we hit the water and we knew our chances of being rescued before the next morning were almost nil. The other raft drifted away in the dark and was never found. In a very short time we were soaking wet from the wind blowin' spray on us and so cold — so cold. I was worried the hand pump would wear out before morning, but the two of us stayed with it all night. When dawn came the other three men were dead of cold and wet exposure. The exercise of pumpin' was just enough to keep two of us alive all that awful night …” Graves paused, unable to go on and tears welled up in his eyes. In a few minutes he recovered. “You'll never know what it was like. Looking at them cold and lifeless was terrible. They were almost like brothers. That morning a patrol boat spotted us and the ordeal was finally over. I'm OK now, John, on another crew, but it won't ever be the same for me again. I'll keep remembering how they looked …”

There may have been other overnight survivors in the North Sea, but Johnny Graves and his crewmate were the only two I heard about. That leak in the raft turned out to be the difference between life and death.

There were not nearly as many air raids against London in late 1943, but one had to be prepared for an air raid any night. If an air raid warning sounded, I followed the crowds to the nearest shelter and waited it out. But one night I was opposite Hyde Park when the sirens began to shriek. That eerie, baleful sound always made shivers ripple through me. There was an antiaircraft battery in the Park, so on impulse I decided to forget the shelter and watch the show, reasoning that I might not get another opportunity to watch antiaircraft fire close by at ground level. I gazed with intense fascination as the huge searchlights stabbed the sky with brilliant beams of light. It was awesome to see those batteries fire and the orange-red bursts high in the sky. A bomber got caught momentarily in the converging beams of two searchlights and gleamed bright in the sky like a lighted billboard. I tried to visualize the blinding terror of the men in the bomber, knowing as they did that they were a perfectly outlined target for the R.A.F. night fighters.

Suddenly pieces began dropping around me and I realized that jagged chunks of cast-iron shell fragments could strike me any second. Quickly I ran into the shelter of a large overhanging doorway until the sirens sounded all clear.

“Good show?” came a voice out of the darkness.

“Yes, indeed,” I replied, “quite fascinating to watch the batteries fire.”

“It might be so to me if I hadn't seen it so many times, you know.”

“Do you often stand here rather than go to the shelters?” I asked.

“Oh, no, tonight I was going to visit friends. When the sirens opened up I was not near a shelter I knew about and I saw this big doorway” was the answer.

We stood talking for a while, then he asked, “Were you headed somewhere special when the raid started?”

“Just back to Piccadilly to see if I can find any of my friends.”

“Would you like to go with me to visit my friends for a little while? And see how some of us Englishmen live in wartime London?”

“That would be interesting. I can go to the club later.”

The friends were a couple with two children living in a nearby flat. They talked at length about the difficulties and trauma encountered in rearing a family surrounded by the terror of war. Both of the men were ex-soldiers who had sustained wounds and were now working in war plants. I felt a warm glow of comradeship with those people who were so hospitable to a man they had never seen before. On my next trip London I used all my rations at the P.X. and carried numerous scarce items to this fine family. The children were delirious with excitement over the candy and the mother was delighted with several bars of soap and some sugar I conned the Mess Sergeant out of.

When an air crew had been in heavy combat action, and appeared to be shaken up, they became eligible for one of the rest homes maintained in England. It was not a matter of the number of raids, but the mental condition of the crew. The Flight Surgeon kept a watchful eye on the men before and after missions. He alone decided when a crew needed a week or two of respite from the war.

Carl Shutting organized a campaign of odd behavior by the crew for the benefit of the Flight Surgeon, Captain Ralston. He had it worked out well, carefully orchestrating the act to catch Ralston's attention, but I had no confidence it would work. The elated Navigator came to our hut in fine spirits that afternoon: “We did it! Ralston thinks we are on the edge of bad nerves. We're leaving for the rest home in the morning for a whole week away from this rat race.”

“Where are we going?” asked Jim.

“Some village on the upper Thames River — that's all I know. Maybe we can get out of this mud for a week anyway.”

“We got you to thank for this. I didn't think our little act would work. You know there isn't a damned thing wrong with any of us.”

“We know that, John — but Ralston don't — and that is what counts.”

“It sounds great.”

We left for Cholsey in fine spirits. The day was clear and cold, which was exceptional for the time of the year. It was too bad that Wilson was in the hospital for frostbite, and Rogers was not included because it was evident that he was not going back on combat duty. George, Jim, Shutting, Purus, Gleichauf, and I were the lucky ones.

At Cholsey Station a personnel truck met us. It was a short ride to our destination. When we pulled into the long driveway, I was surprised at the layout. It was a magnificent old manor house, beautifully covered with ivy. The house was four stories high and the lovely grounds were spacious and well kept. Green lawns, attractive hedges, and bright flowers were a welcome sight.

The staff met us at the door. “Welcome to Buckeley's Manor! We hope you will have a pleasant stay here. Each man will be assigned a room to himself. The schedule for meals is posted on the bulletin board, and you can dine any time during the hours listed.”

We went upstairs and were shown our rooms. Imagine having a room all to myself.

“Here are your sheets.”

Sheets? I had forgotten about such things.

The bathrooms were down the hall.

“What time of the day do you have hot water?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh, it's always hot until ten P.M. Then we turn it on again each morning at seven o'clock.”

Unbelievable! How long had it been since I had a hot bath?

“Let's go downstairs and fit you men with tweed trousers and pullover sweaters,” said one of the staff members. “You are free to wear these clothes instead of your uniform while at Buckeley's.”

After dinner that evening all of us were issued passes for the week.

“You are free to do what you wish with your time while here. We have tennis courts, a trap or skeet range, badminton courts, and there are golf courses nearby. Or you may enjoy archery and horseback riding. You will be issued a bicycle so you can ride into the villages or explore the countryside. The beautiful Thames River is close by and we suggest you take a boat trip up the Thames. A boat runs a regular schedule every day. Enjoy yourselves while here. Forget about the war. If you have any other requests, please let us know.”

The Thames River upstream is quite different from the muddy, commercial estuary a traveler sees at London. The Thames I saw was a beautiful river, clean and sparkling. Fine old estates bordered each bank, and their well-kept grounds sloped to the edge of the estuary. Most of the homes had private piers and boats; it was England at her finest. The stream wound between inviting lawns and overhanging trees for mile after mile, becoming more picturesque as the boat moved farther upstream.

At Buckeley's there were men from many groups in the Air Force, and some recently from North Africa. I noticed that most of the latter were recovering from wounds or nervous shock. Late at night we sat around huge open fireplaces and swapped experiences — experiences that no doubt were expanded in the act of retelling. Each morning our routine included some fast tennis to limber up, then a bicycle ride around the back roads until lunch time. In the afternoon we would shoot skeet for a while, then take off for another ride through unspoiled rural byways. We were lucky to find a pleasant pub at Wallingsford, a village remote from major cities. Uniforms were nonexistent except for us — too rural for soldiers. That pub gave me an insight as to how the villagers lived. I listened to intimate political discussions, and learned for the first time that England had a fast-growing movement toward socialism and some tendency toward mild communism. I learned that, although the English strongly supported Churchill, many of them were opposed to the Tory party. They wanted him for the war, because strong leadership was required, but I listened in amazement to what they wanted in the future. They did not want a Churchill government after the war. They were determined that England was not going back to a government dominated by the aristocracy. (After the war when Americans were shocked that Churchill was turned out of office, I remembered Wallingsford and knew why.)