To Kingdom Come (4 page)

It was what he had come to England for.

Eaker had ordered a “maximum-effort” strike for the following day, Monday, September 6. It would be the biggest attack of heavy bombers ever sent against a single target in Germany.

The twenty-mile-long armada of nearly 350 Fortresses would bomb the ball-bearing and aircraft complexes at Stuttgart, Germany, while another force of sixty nine B-24 bombers would fly diversionary raids across the North Sea to France and Holland, designed to draw the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons away from the main force. It was the first time in the war that more than four hundred bombers would participate in a single mission.

The seven groups of the Fourth Bombardment Wing would lead the attack on Stuttgart. The nine groups of the First Bombardment Wing, led by Brigadier General Robert Travis, would hit the targets in Stuttgart right behind them.

Arnold was asleep at Claridge’s when the Teletype machines at High Wycombe began clattering out the operational orders to the bomb groups based across southern England that would participate in the mission.

The telexes contained the takeoff times for each group, the assembly points for the groups after takeoff, the routes to be followed to the target, communications procedures, the size of the bomb loads, the projected weather over Europe, and the anticipated enemy response in terms of the numbers of enemy fighters and antiaircraft installations.

“URGENT SECRET ... FIELD ORDER NO 53,” began the opening line to the Fourth Bombardment Wing.

THE WARRIORS

Reb

Sunday, 5 September 1943
384th Bomb Group
Grafton Underwood, England
Sergeant Olen “Reb” Grant
2350

T
here were some very good reasons why Sergeant Olen “Reb” Grant was happy that the 384th hadn’t been alerted for a bombing mission the following day. The most agreeable one was lying next to him in the ancient church cemetery in Leicester.

With the rough-hewn good looks of a rodeo bronc buster, the twenty-year-old from Eldorado, Arkansas, particularly enjoyed dating British factory girls. Many of them worked brutally long hours in monotonous jobs, and they looked at making love as a form of relaxation and release, just like the boys in the combat crews after they returned from a tough mission. Underneath the girls’ ill-fitting clothes, some of them were truly stunning.

He had hitched a ride that evening with one of the truck convoys that carried fuel and freight between the American air base at Grafton Underwood and Leicester, the nearest large city, about thirty miles away. It was an important manufacturing center, and the armament plants all had big barrage balloons tethered in the sky above them to discourage low-level air attacks. To Reb, they looked like floating elephants.

Once in the city, he usually stopped at a roadside stand to buy a newspaper-wrapped portion of fish and chips. The greasy food seemed to lessen the effects of a hangover from the beer and whiskey he usually drank.

If the war hadn’t come along, Reb would have already been married. After making sergeant for the first time, he had asked his girlfriend Dorothy to marry him, and she had said no. Her reason was that he might get killed, or even worse, crippled, and she couldn’t stand the thought of it. In the wake of her rejection, he made up his mind not to get serious about any woman for the rest of the war.

That was before he met Estella. Just eighteen, she was Irish, and had a fresh-scrubbed innocence to her, along with a spirited personality and an easy sense of humor. She took pleasure in mimicking his Southern drawl. And like him, she had the resilience to take the tough breaks that life had handed out, including the loneliness of being far from home. It didn’t hurt that she was a ripe-bodied redhead with a wonderful Irish lilt to her voice.

He had been dating her almost a month, ever since he had pried her loose from another flier who was trying to score. That first night, Reb decided not to use her for a one-night stand, even if she was willing. After they had gone out several times, she told him that she knew a safe spot where they could finally be together.

Due to the blackout restrictions, the city was always as dark as pitch, and there were few places for an American soldier to take a girl where they could be alone. The local parks had become the most common trysting grounds, but every bench was usually occupied.

They had walked across a good piece of Leicester before she led him through an iron gate that was cut into the middle of a high stone wall. It was dark and mysterious inside. Then he blundered into the first tombstone.

“The dead cannot see,” she said to him when he realized where he was.

The next thing he knew they were lying together in the tall, unmown grass. After they were together the first time, she had asked him about his life back in the United States.

Reb decided not to spin a line. He told her they shared the same Irish heritage. His forebears had arrived in North Carolina after fleeing the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. From there, later generations of the Grant family had moved west.

He had grown up dirt poor in the horse-and-buggy town of Eldorado, Arkansas, close to the Louisiana border. It was an oil town with one big refinery that ran twenty-four hours a day. His father, Eli Sullivan Grant, loved being a roustabout in the oil fields, but after the Depression hit, he took work where he could find it.

For several years, the family lived in a small house so close to the refinery that the stench of hot petroleum was constant. At night in his bedroom, the floodlamps around the facility made it seem like daylight.

Reb went to school during the day. In the evenings, he sold his uncle’s eggs door-to-door, six for a nickel. He wore the same blue bib overalls until the knees wore out. Then his mother would trim the leg portions off above the knees and hem the edges. He rarely wore shoes.

One day, his dad heard they had struck oil near Longview, Texas. He put the three kids and everything the family owned in his old car and drove there. He was offered a job, and the family moved into a squatters’ shantytown outside Longview with the other new workers.

Their home was a single room under a tin roof with canvas walls, and a separate tent for the kitchen. There was no running water. Reb’s principal chore was to go fetch a five-gallon can of it from a well every morning.

Estella had been brought up in an Irish family that was as impoverished as Reb’s. Her father had worked most of his life as a tenant farmer on a large estate. After the Depression hit, the owner of the estate stopped paying wages to his tenants. Fortunately, the families were allowed to share some of the farm produce they grew. Estella hoped that someday she would be able to earn enough money to go to school.

Her background struck a resonant chord with Reb, and the two lovers formed a deepening bond as the weeks passed. This would be the last night they would spend together for several weeks. Estella had received permission from her factory manager to travel home to Ireland to see her ailing father.

It had rained most of that Sunday, and the unmown grass of the church cemetery remained soaked. Reb had spread his raincoat over one of the low granite tombstones. A thick fog settled over the ground, making the graveyard even more ghostly than usual. Lying together on the slab, they stayed up talking late into the night. Reb fell asleep in her arms.

It was well past two in the morning when they headed back to their favorite pub for a nightcap before he walked her home. They were approaching the blacked-out street entrance when someone on the sidewalk switched on a powerful flashlight and pointed it at his face.

It was an American military policeman. He demanded Reb’s name and unit. Reb gave him his identification card and produced his overnight pass from the 384th Bomb Group headquarters. The MP scanned a clipboard in the beam of his flashlight.

“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” said the exasperated MP.

“You wouldn’t have found me,” said Reb.

“Get in the back of the jeep,” said the policeman. “You’re flying a mission tomorrow.”

The teletyped alert had arrived at his base in Grafton Underwood shortly after Reb had left for Leicester. The military police had been given a list of the crewmen who were off base and scheduled to fly, and the men had fanned out in all the nearby towns to find them. Reb’s name was on the list.

He asked Estella to write to him from Ireland. She promised she would. As he rode through the silent, fog-shrouded villages on the way back to Grafton Underwood, Reb wondered what the target might be. Since the new air offensive had begun against Germany, more than half the men in his barracks had gone missing. He hoped it wouldn’t be another mission like Schweinfurt.

The MP had no idea where the group was going, but he said it was definitely a maximum effort. Every plane that could pass inspection was going out. He had never seen so much activity at the base.

Maybe it would be another milk run to France.

After almost two years of service, Reb Grant had come to love the army. He had joined right after graduation from high school in 1941, and quickly felt like he was living rich. Good food, new uniforms, and clean sheets on his bed. He turned out to be a natural at handling weaponry, and within a year had been promoted to sergeant in the armament section of the 384th Bomb Group.

Except for the freshly minted junior officers who acted like they were the second coming of Eddie Rickenbacker, and who took pleasure in dressing down sergeants who didn’t salute with sufficient flair, life was good.

With his growing expertise in the B-17’s defensive weapons systems, Reb was awarded the fifth stripe of a technical sergeant and personally selected by Colonel Budd Peaslee, the group commander, to become the armament inspector of the 384th Bomb Group.

Each group was comprised of four squadrons. A full complement for a squadron was twelve bombers, giving the group a potential of forty-eight planes and 480 men.

In April 1943, the 384th was at Wendover Field in Utah, about to leave to join the Eighth Air Force in England. Many of the Fortresses in the group required their one-hundred-hour inspection, in which all the systems in the plane were checked, including the engines, hydraulics, radio communications, and armament, before the aircraft could be declared ready for active service. Reb’s job was to personally inspect each B-17’s motorized gun turrets and its eight Browning .50-caliber machine guns.

The base commander at Wendover had issued a strict order that no live ammunition could be loaded aboard a bomber until it had passed the final armament inspection. On the morning before the group was scheduled to leave, Reb was crouched in the ball turret of a B-17 to inspect its twin .50-caliber machine guns. He needed to check the firing mechanism, and since there was no electricity in the parked aircraft, he used his screwdriver to activate the solenoids behind the gun switch.

Instead of hearing the distinctive click of the firing pin, the machine guns began spewing .50-caliber rounds. The gun barrels were pointed down at the tarmac, but the lead slugs ricocheted off the concrete and tore a number of big holes in the horizontal stabilizer of the plane.

Some idiot in the armament section had loaded live ammunition in the guns in violation of the base commander’s standing order. Before Reb could find out who had done it, he was ordered to report to Colonel Peaslee, the 384th’s commander, who was ripping mad that he might lose one of his planes the day before the group left for Europe.

Without giving Reb a chance to explain what had happened, he busted him from sergeant to private, and ordered him transferred from group headquarters to the 545th Squadron, where he said Reb would be assigned every shit detail that could be found for him.

Later that day, Reb managed to discover who had armed the machine guns on the plane, but by then he had been formally charged in a court-martial proceeding. This led to a major complication for the group.

If Reb pleaded not guilty to the charges, a court-martial board had to be appointed, and the proceeding would be convened after Olen was given time to prepare his defense. Under army regulations, the 384th could not depart for England until the court-martial board had rendered its verdict, which meant that the group would miss its deployment window, and probably be sent back to Gowen Field in Idaho for another month’s training. This had already happened to the 100th Bomb Group, and they had been cooling their heels and growing stale for weeks.

After learning that Reb was innocent of negligent conduct, a chastened Colonel Peaslee told him that if he pleaded guilty to the charges, he would personally see to it that Reb was restored to the rank of sergeant and given back his previous assignment in the group. Reb was dubious. The only way he could receive a promotion was if there was an available billet above him, and every position was filled.

Trust me, said the old man. Reb did.

In England, Colonel Peaslee made good on his pledge. Every time a new promotion list came out, Reb found his name on it until he made sergeant again. In June 1943, he was working in the armament section, inspecting the Fortresses’ guns.