The Secret Rescue (6 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
I
n the early morning hours of November 8, as they brushed away thoughts of sleep, thirteen of the 807th’s flight nurses, ranging from twenty-two to thirty-two years old, boarded jeeps outside their Sicilian villa. Almost all wore grayish-green field coats over their slate-blue wool uniforms and carried musette bags packed with a few extra clothes, books, and magazines. The sky was clear for the first time in days, but most of the women, if not all, wore galoshes over their military shoes to protect them from the muddy airfield.
Capt. Robert Simpson, a thirty-two-year-old flight surgeon from Washington, DC, traveled with the nurses to the airfield that morning to find out the latest weather forecast from the pilots. Storms had grounded the 807th for the past three days, and patients needing to be evacuated were piling up in Bari and Grottaglie. With so much work to be done, McKnight had decided to send half the squadron’s medical personnel to help. It was the first, and last, time he sent so many on one plane.
The nurses and Simpson arrived at the Operations building, where they were joined by twelve of the 807th’s medics dressed in their khaki wool uniforms, dark-green field jackets, and peaked hats with maroon piping that indicated they were part of the Medical Department. Knowing the muddy field’s condition, most of the medics wore military leggings over their pants to keep them clean. Like many of the nurses, the medics had been driven to the airfield several times over the past few days only to have to return to their barracks when their flights were canceled. On one of the mornings, Hayes’s driver, a former medic who refused to fly after experiencing bad weather weeks earlier and had been demoted, warned Hayes that one of these times he wouldn’t come back. “I’d rather be a private than a dead T/3,” he’d told Hayes, who dismissed the comment.
Though he knew none of the others, a medic from the 802nd, Cpl. Gilbert Hornsby, a twenty-one-year-old with a Kentucky drawl, was also joining the flight. After collecting his pay at the 802nd’s headquarters in Palermo, Hornsby had flown to Catania and was hitching a ride to his assigned station at Bari.
The thirteen nurses and thirteen medics checked into Operations so their names could be added to the flight manifest and they could be weighed to ensure that their transport plane was under its weight limit. Their plane that morning was a C-53D Skytrooper, a variant of the rugged Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Nicknamed “the Gooney Bird” by American soldiers and dubbed a “Dakota” by the British, the C-47 was later considered by Eisenhower to be one of the most vital pieces of military equipment used in the campaigns in Africa and Europe. The aircraft served in every theater in the war. Almost identical to the C-47, the C-53 was designed specifically to carry paratroops and tow troop-carrying gliders and, as a result, lacked the C-47’s large cargo door and reinforced floor.
Since the War Department had been given the responsibility of evacuating sick and wounded men to the AAF, the AAF had used C-53s and C-47s, among a few other planes, to pick up patients and medical personnel on their return flights from forward areas. Thousands of C-47s were built during the war, but only a few hundred of the C-53s were ever constructed. Both versions lacked firepower; and, if attacked by the enemy while traveling without an escort, the pilots knew their only chance was to try to outwit the enemy.
The four-man flight crew waiting near the plane had never flown together before this mission but were all members of the 61st Troop Carrier Squadron of the 314th Troop Carrier Group, which had dropped paratroops into Sicily during the invasion in July. The crew had flown the plane from their new base in Castelvetrano on the other side of the island to Catania the day before, expecting to transport the 807th personnel. The pilot, First Lt. Charles Thrasher, had canceled the trip, however, because of bad weather and reports that a B-25 pilot had been forced to turn back.
A dark-haired twenty-two-year-old, Thrasher was from a prominent Daytona Beach, Florida, family and had attended Bolles Military Academy, where he was one of its top athletes and was known for his jitterbug moves on the dance floor. He had enlisted in 1941 and had just been promoted the previous month from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, which made him the senior officer on board that morning’s flight—despite also being the youngest officer.
His copilot was 2nd Lt. James Baggs, a charming and outgoing twenty-eight-year-old from Savannah, Georgia, who enlisted in 1942 and kept a photo of his five-year-old nephew Hunter in the cockpit whenever he flew to remind him of home. Like Thrasher, Baggs had also attended a military school, the Academy of Richmond County, in Augusta, Georgia. He later trained as a fighter pilot at Foster Field in Texas before being selected for special training as a troop carrier pilot and had already flown one hundred missions.
Sgt. Willis Shumway, a six-foot-tall, twenty-three-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, who dreamed of becoming a photographer, filled in for the plane’s regular crew chief. Sgt. Richard “Dick” Lebo, another twenty-three-year-old from Halifax, Pennsylvania, an avid athlete who raced pigeons and liked to write in his spare time, served as the radio operator.
Jens was the first of the medical personnel to board the plane, and she sat toward the front in one of the metal bucket seats lining each side of the aircraft. Headstrong and independent, Jens had been looking for adventure when she left her nursing job at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and joined the Army in February 1941, ten months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Army immediately sent her to work at the station hospital at Fort Benning, a sprawling post near Columbus, Georgia. She’d never flown before and had paid extra to travel by plane instead of by train from Michigan just for the experience. She liked it so much that she and a fellow nurse had taken advantage of loose regulations to hitch rides at Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning during training flights, making sure they were back on base before anyone noticed their absence.
When she began her duties at the Army hospital, Jens did so without any military training. The training of ANC nurses at the time defaulted to whatever instruction their chief nurse could provide. As the Army’s nursing recruitment efforts to remedy a major nursing shortage began to pay off, chief nurses became overwhelmed with the demands of training the newly enlisted on top of their other responsibilities. By the time the country entered the war, many of those who were appointed chief nurses were as new to the military as their trainees and lacked the necessary experience in teaching and protocol. In late 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General recognized the need for more formal instruction of nurses and issued guidelines that required them to have a month of instruction on everything from military courtesy and customs to physical training defense against chemical, mechanized, and air attacks.
As months of dinner dates and dancing ticked by, Jens had realized that life for her had changed very little since joining the Army, even as the rest of the world erupted into chaos. When the AAF put out a call for graduate nurses to join the air evacuation program in late 1942, she was excited at the prospect of a job that promised travel, adventure, and flying.
Several of the other nurses who followed Jens on board the plane that morning had worked as airline stewardesses before the war, including Rutkowski. For years, some airlines had required stewardesses to be nurses after they recognized that many skittish passengers fearful of flying took comfort in having the trained women on flights. Gertrude “Tooie” Dawson from Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, Pauleen Kanable from Richland Center, Wisconsin, and Ann E. Kopsco from Hammond, Louisiana, who was almost always referred to as Ann E., were also former stewardesses. Others who piled into the plane that morning had worked in hospitals or in private nursing before they joined the Army and had responded to the country’s pleas for nurses to join the military.
The youngest of the women was curly-haired Lillian Tacina, who, like Jens and Rutkowski, had grown up in Michigan. Tacina, or “Tassy” as the other nurses called her, was from Hamtramck and was one of five children. Like many of those on board that morning, she had siblings who were also in the military. Elna Schwant from Winner, South Dakota, had a younger brother Willard, a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy Reserve who had been missing in action since August. He had been a copilot on a patrol bomber in the Atlantic Ocean when the crew reported seeing an enemy submarine and was preparing to destroy it. The plane was never heard from again.
Also on board were Ann Maness from Paris, Texas; Ann “Marky” Markowitz who, like Watson, was from Chicago; Frances Nelson from Princeton, West Virginia; Helen Porter from Hanksville, Utah; and Wilma Lytle from Butler, Kentucky. Of the thirteen, only Watson and Nelson were married.
The thirteen medics, including Hayes, Owen, Abbott, and Wolf, followed the nurses into the cabin and filled the empty seats. Hayes had always loved planes. He’d been fascinated by them since his dad, who had served in World War I as an airplane mechanic, first pointed at one that was flying over their home when Hayes was just four years old. In high school Hayes had dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. He’d first wanted to be a pilot, but he knew his poor eyesight ruled that out.
When Hayes graduated in 1940, his family couldn’t afford to send him to college, so he held a series of odd jobs until he was drafted and reported for duty in Indianola on November 3, 1942. He was immediately sent to Camp Barkeley, Texas, where he learned, to his disappointment, that he had been assigned to the Medical Department. He started his training as a sanitary technician, a specialty within the Medical Department designed to help prevent the spread of diseases, and found, much to his surprise, that he enjoyed it. He finished the program, and the Army shipped him to Bowman Field, where he started working with McKnight in setting up a dispensary. When McKnight was made commanding officer of the 807th, he asked Hayes to join as a flight medic, a request Hayes gladly accepted.
Paul Allen from Greenville, Kentucky, the youngest in the group at only nineteen, boarded the plane and sat across from Jens. Also from Kentucky, from a small town that shared his last name, was William Eldridge, who’d worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad before the war. The oldest of the men was thirty-six-year-old Robert Cranson from New Haven, New York, one of four medics who were married. The other three included Wolf, Gordon MacKinnon from Los Angeles, California, and Charles Zeiber, an easygoing twenty-six-year-old newlywed from Reading, Pennsylvania. Also on board were Jim Cruise from Brockton, Massachusetts; Raymond Ebers from Steeleville, Illinois; the odd man out, Hornsby from the 802nd; and Charles Adams of Niles, Michigan, whose brother had been taken prisoner by the Japanese on Wake Island in December 1941 and was being held in a prison camp in Shanghai.
Two of the passengers were never intended to be on the flight. Abbott had switched places at the last minute with one of the other 807th’s medics so he could repay a twenty-five-dollar loan to Voigt, the 807th flight surgeon at Bari; and Rutkowski had learned early that morning that Stakeman, their chief nurse, had accidentally added her to the roster for the day. Rutkowski brought the number of nurses on board to thirteen instead of the twelve McKnight had requested. Since she had already gotten up early, however, she decided to go and help the others.
With the differences in rank and having completed most of their training separately, the nurses and medics exchanged polite but friendly hellos as they settled into their seats and buckled their belts for the roughly two-hour flight to Bari. Flight surgeon Simpson, who had come with the nurses that morning, had also boarded the plane to get an update on the weather, and the pilots came into the cabin to speak with him. Checking the weather along and adjacent to the planned line of flight was as critical a task for all pilots before takeoff as checking the fuel supply. Thrasher told Simpson the weather reports were favorable enough to fly, with scattered showers but no mention of thunderstorms. Bari was open and Grottaglie, currently closed, was expected to open. Satisfied, Simpson took his leave, and the pilots returned to the cockpit.
Crew chief Shumway secured the passenger door as the pilots took their seats in the cockpit, and Lebo settled into his separate radio compartment behind the cockpit. Around eight thirty a.m., Thrasher received clearance and pushed the throttles forward, bringing the plane’s two engines to life. The passengers sat back in their seats and listened to the familiar roar of the engines as the C-53D took to the sky. During the climb, they could see the island’s rolling hills pass below them as they edged northeast toward the toe of Italy. The plane reached its initial cruising altitude quickly, and within fifteen minutes the coast of Calabria in southern Italy was in their sight.
