The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (23 page)

Rounds was one of those out of the hospital and he was in high spirits. Defying the miserable weather - rain, sleet, fog - he told Bill Ashlock to help him spill a fifty-five-gallon drum of white gasoline on the field next to the cooking area. He wanted to spill the fuel and set it afire as a form of fireworks to celebrate the new year.

“Rounds, you don’t have any idea what you’re about to do,” Ashlock said. “If that stuff gets in the air while you’re pouring it, it will create an explosion and the flames are liable to cover a huge area. You don’t want to do it.” Rounds did want to do it. Ashlock recalled that “he did it anyway by himself.”

Ashlock retired to his tent. A half-hour later he heard a “big whoomp sound.” Rounds came running to the tent, “his eyebrows singed off, his face black. And he says, ‘You know, you were right. That thing blew me about thirty feet through the air.’”2 It was an inauspicious start to the new year. And the weather through January was even worse than predicted. Only an occasional mission was attempted, and McGovern did not go on them. His tent-mate and close companion, navigator Lt.  Sam Adams, did go on two missions. Because McGovern had flown as a co-pilot for five missions, he was five missions ahead of his crew in reaching the magic number, thirty-five. Adams hated to fly with any pilot other than McGovern, but he wanted to get home as soon as possible to take up his studies to become a Presbyterian minister. So he volunteered for missions as a substitute navigator.  On his second substitute service, in the second week of January, Adams’s plane was blown apart by German flak. There were reports, unconfirmed, that two or three parachutes had been seen after the plane exploded.  McGovern and Rounds held on to the hope that Sam had made it out of the plane and came down by parachute. They depended on substitute navigators on their missions, but for a few weeks they lived with Sam’s empty bunk, his photographs, and his neatly hung clothing, waiting for word that he had made it. The word never came.3 “I had seen other men killed before,” McGovern said, “but never anything like that. When there are just three of you living together so closely in a tent in an olive grove in Italy, a helluva long way from home, you really got to know one another. And then all of a sudden you see the empty bunk and it really gets to you.”4 There were many empty bunks. Lt. Victor McWilliams was a pilot in the 741st Squadron. Once that January he was watching as other pilots and crew from the squadron took off for a mission that was ultimately aborted. One B-24 got into the sky but then turned around to come back to base. Suddenly, for no reason McWilliams could ever find out, the ten bombs in the plane exploded. “You looked up and all you saw was dust.” Everyone on the plane was killed.  Another plane was headed down the runway. The pilot got the nose up and the tail went down and “you knew he wouldn’t make it. At the end of the runway he cut the throttle and the plane nosed over and caught fire.” McWilliams and four others dashed to the plane, picked up a piece of drill pipe and knocked the windows off around the cockpit. The tail gunner meanwhile jumped out, as did a waist gunner, who broke his arm.”But the cockpit was on fire and the plane was burning. We hauled out the pilot. He was burned almost beyond recognition. We laid him on the ground. All the time he was saying, ‘Just leave me in the plane, leave me here, leave me here,’ because he knew he was gone.” McWilliams and the others got him into the ambulance “and he didn’t even last to get to the hospital. That was the first time I ever saw anybody burned up that way. His hands were just burnt down to nothing.” Somehow the co-pilot got out. “I don’t know how. Just one of these unexplained things.”5 Lt. Francis Hosimer was a B-24 pilot in the 741st Squadron. He flew his first five missions as a co-pilot. On one of them, going over Vienna, his squadron was part of a four-squadron group. There was another group ahead of his. The flak came up, heavy. “Just while we were watching the group in front, three of the planes started burning. They just kept flying on level, they didn’t go down but then just burst into real bright flames almost like a flashgun going off. Very intense fire and there were no chutes coming out so that meant that thirty men died right there. The pilot looked over to me and said that is where we’re going to be in a minute. I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into.” His plane was shot up but got through.6 The men of the 741st Squadron badly needed some rest.  In mid-January, McGovern and Rounds learned that they were entitled to ten days off duty, in Rome, the Isle of Capri, or Naples. General Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces, ordered the U.S. Army and Army Air Forces to provide ten days leave for combat veterans. That was easier to do with AAF personnel than infantry, but still the attempt was made. Eisenhower also got involved in picking the hotels for his boys. On a cruise around the Isle of Capri, he spotted a large villa. “Whose is that?” he asked.  “Yours, sir,” was the reply. His aides had arranged it.  “And that?” Eisenhower asked, nodding at another large villa. “That one belongs to General Spaatz.”

“Damn it, that’snot my villa!” Eisenhower thundered. “And that’s not General Spaatz’s villa! None of these will belong to any general as long as I’m boss around here. This is supposed to be a rest center - for combat men - not a playground for the brass!”

He meant it. When he returned to shore, he wired Spaatz, “This is directly contrary to my policies and must cease at once.”7 As a consequence of Eisenhower’s orders, the Isle of Capri, Naples, and Rome were hosts to thousands of GIs in late 1944 and 1945. It was like a dream, or could be anyway. “’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her,” Lt. Roland Pepin remembered of his trip to the famous island. “She told me she was a contessa and that her name was Monica.” Pepin didn’t care what she chose to call herself. He had a “torrid ten-day romance.” Monica lived in a villa and Pepin stayed with her. She spoke English, French, and Italian, and took Pepin on sightseeing tours. They rented a boat and explored the caverns of the Blue Grotto. Pepin’s conclusion, after ten days of living on a near-paradise, was that Eisenhower and his fellow generals were right to assign weary men to a rest and recreation interlude. For Pepin, “The salt, sun, sea, and Monica rejuvenated me into my former self, and I was ready to get on with the war.”8 McGovern and Rounds took off for Capri, along with some of the crew. Radio operator Kenneth Higgins was one of them. Like everyone, Higgins had been bored at Cerignola. “When we didn’t fly a mission there wasn’t a lot to do,” he recalled. The weather precluded any softball games or other outdoor exercise.  Occasionally the crew would go to the target range and practice with their .45s, but there wasn’t much fun in that. So, “we would sit around and argue with each other and play cards or dice. One time we said no more cussing. Everybody cusses all the time so the first guy that does cuss has to put some money in the pot.  Well that lasted about ten minutes.” Being a Texan, Higgins always wore a pair of cowboy boots, whether he was in the plane, on the ground, or on leave. When he got to Capri, he kissed the ground and had a big glass of fresh milk. Italian kids came up to him to ask if he was a girl with those long boots and big heels and leather jacket. No, Higgins replied. He said he was just a cool cat.  He too rested and rejuvenated. He got ready to return to the war. Fifty-five years later, when he was being interviewed, Higgins said that whenever things were going bad at work or home in his postwar career, he would settle down by thinking of the guy at the airfield who woke him up in the morning at four o’clock to say get dressed and go fly a mission. “There’s nothing worse than that.” So they could call him whatever names they wished in Capri, Higgins decided; he was going to enjoy himself.9 Everyone did. Lt. Ted Withington, a prewar Harvard student who was by late 1944 a B-24 pilot in the 780th Squadron, wrote his parents about his experience.  “Talk about wonderful vacations!” he declared. “Nothing to do wedon’t want to and lots of interesting things to do if we care to.” It was a “week of luxury with no worries.” He stayed in the AAF villa on “one of Europe’s most beautiful Isles.” He had taken a steamer from Naples, out into the Bay of Naples, past Pompeii and Vesuvius and out to Capri at the mouth of the bay. He had a “lovely room” overlooking the sea, complete with balcony. Most blessed of all, “You sleep as late as you want to, in real large beds withpillows & sheets! Maid and waiter service all the time. Thisain’t the Army!”10 Radio operator Bob Hammer of the 742nd Squadron got to Capri right after New Year’s. He loved it, especially that except for booze everything was free. There was a dance each night, alternating officers and enlisted men. Sergeant Hammer and his pilot went to all of them by wearing each other’s uniforms. In the morning, they overslept and missed the ferry going back to the mainland. Again the next day they slept late. After missing the ferry three times, they finally caught it and then lucked out by catching a B-24 back to Cerignola. Fearing a court-martial, they were, on the contrary, not even reprimanded, as the 742nd had flown no missions due to weather while they were gone.11 As Lieutenant Withington put it, this wasn’t the Army!

McGovern and Rounds stayed on Capri for three days. They rode the funicular, took a tour of the Blue Grotto, and examined the ruins of Roman emperor Tiberius’s castle. The second night one of his enlisted crew got drunk and into a brawl. McAfee, the ball turret gunner who was present, recalled that the culprit “wound up in the pokey on Capri, and McGovern had to get him out.”12 McGovern and Rounds decided there was not enough action on Capri, so they hopped on a boat that was just crossing to Naples, where they caught a train to Rome.  They registered at the Regina Hotel, which had been taken over by the AAF and is still in operation in a grand style in the twenty-first century. In 1945, every night starting at 6:00 P.M. the whole ground floor of the lobby was turned into a dance area. Girls from Rome were there, after passing through a screening by the AAF authorities, designed to keep teenagers away. Most of the women were in their mid-twenties.

They were beautiful but they were caught up in the desperation that comes to many civilians in a war zone. Many were educated, spoke at least some English, had lost husbands, fathers. Beer, vodka, scotch, gin, and more was flowing.  There were free bedrooms upstairs. The fee for the women was $30, but they would take payment in cigarettes or mattress covers. The covers were very popular because the women could make clothing for all the family from them.  Rounds had a great time, of course, but he also got up with McGovern each morning to go on foot for ten or twelve hours of sightseeing. Looking at every art gallery, every church, every statue, using their guidebook, every day for seven days. Rounds accounted for his interest in the city by explaining to McGovern that his father had told him if he ever got to Rome he must see this or that. So, Rounds said, “I don’t dare go home without seeing this or that, my old man will kill me.” With that much motivation, Rounds started reading up on the great artists.

McGovern meanwhile learned of a special audience for American servicemen in the Vatican with the Pope. He persuaded Rounds to go with him. After standing around waiting for an hour, Rounds stage-whispered to McGovern, “I”m getting the hell out of here.”

McGovern replied, “Look, this man is the head of state and he’s the symbol of the Catholic world, and you will feel very silly if you go back to the States and you haven’t met the Pope.” He talked Rounds into waiting fifteen minutes.  When that time was up, he asked him to stay for just fifteen more minutes.

“I wouldn’t wait another fifteen minutes for Jesus Christ,” Rounds shot back.  But he said it too loud and “it stirred up quite a commotion among the devout Catholic troops.” There were 500 or so at the audience. The Pope did soon arrive and shook hands with every one. He spoke English and blessed each of them.

Rounds said,

“For the rest of my life I’ll tell people I saw and shook hands with the Pope.”13 To McGovern, Rounds’s desire to see all he could in Rome was “an indication, a tiny one, that ours was the best educated army ever put into the field. And the best paid. We were paid way better than the British and enormously better than the Germans. I don’t know if the Italian army ever got paid at all or the Red Army either.”14 In the U.S. Army infantry, there was a certain amount of resentment of the AAF officers and men. How could there not be? No ground trooper ever wore cowboy boots, not even on leave, certainly not when up on the line. No one in the infantry ever reported back from a leave three days late without being severely reprimanded or possibly subjected to a court-martial. And the ages of the lieutenants, even the ages of the captains and majors in the AAF were astonishing to foot soldiers.

At a bar in Rome, two infantry officers from the U.S. Fifth Army, which was doing the fighting on the ground in Italy under the command of Gen. Mark Clark, approached McGovern. One of them sat down on the stool next to McGovern, reached out, and flicked the wings on McGovern’s jacket with his finger.  “You fly boys think you’re pretty hot stuff, don’t ya.” “No, not really,” McGovern replied. “I think the Fifth Army is doing a heck of a job and I hope we can help.”

“Bull,” the infantry officer responded.”You fly boys are just too good for us, aren’t you.” McGovern resisted the temptation to hit the man.  When the leave was over it was back to Cerignola. For Lieutenant Pepin, a navigator, his first mission after returning was almost a disaster. It was on January 20. The target was the main marshaling yards at Linz, Austria. The flak was heavy. Shrapnel punctured some of his plane’s hydraulic lines and the pilot was unable to close the bomb bay doors or lower the landing gear and could barely keep the Liberator in the air. He had managed to get back over Italy and close to Cerignola. He ordered the men to bail out. The plane was at 3,000 feet.  “Petrified,” Pepin related, “I was sitting with my feet hanging out of the bomb bay afraid to jump when the pilot pushed me into the wild blue yonder. Stark fear gripped me until my chute opened. The ground appeared to rush toward me and fear came again. My landing was the same as taking a wicked body check from a big hockey player.” He rolled over several times, got up, and discovered that he was unhurt. Ambulances from the base came around to pick him up. “Every member of my crew survived and without injuries.”15 On January 31, McGovern and his crew went up on a mission, to bomb the oil refinery at Moosbierbaum, Austria. There were nineteen B-24s on the mission, each carrying 500-pound bombs. They encountered moderate, but accurate, flak, and dropped on target.