The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (9 page)

As McGovern was wondering if Ray was related to his college friend, the instructor came into the room, and it was Norman Ray himself. Ray had joined the AAF immediately after completing the course at Wesleyan and been in the service for a year and a half. When he completed his training he was so good a pilot that the AAF, instead of sending him overseas, had made him an instructor on the B-24 bomber.* “Didn’t surprise me,” McGovern said, “because the guy just ate, slept, and breathed flying.”

Ray barely smiled at McGovern (who found out later that Ray had asked for him to be his student). McGovern thought, I can’t call him “sir,” it will make me feel ridiculous. But he thought again and said, “Well, sir, I’m glad that I got assigned to you.”

Ray replied, “Well, don’t think it’s going to be easy, because it isn’t. This is a tough course here and you’re not going to find many easy hours here at this field with this airplane.” He gave McGovern a hint of a smile but no flash of recognition at all. “And I can tell you,” McGovern said, “he never gave me one tiny little break - not a bit. If everybody else had to do a maneuver ten times, I had to do it fifteen.”

McGovern had a lot to learn, Ray had a lot to teach. “He was just smooth as glass,” McGovern recalled, “the way he could move that bomber around.” Ray taught McGovern how to read all those gauges, how to use the switches, how to manipulate the flaps and use the rudders, how to take off and land, how to keep the plane level, how to bank it, how high and how fast to fly it, and that there was nothing more useless to a pilot than altitude above, runway behind, or gasoline down at the airfield. Whenever McGovern made a mistake, or hesitated, Ray gave him hell.

Once on a night flight Ray was teaching him how to use the radio compass on the B-24, how to get back to base and how to pick up another base and other points, how to navigate with the help of the instruments, and so on. He went over the procedures with McGovern several times, then when they were fifty miles or more away from Liberal, he sat back in his pilot’s seat and said, “Okay, take me home.”

It was a dark night. There were no lights on the ground. McGovern almost froze.

He couldn’t remember anything. Nothing worked.

“Well, George,” Ray said, “let me put it to you this way - you either take us back to that field or I’m going to wash you out.” There was no hint of a smile.  As McGovern remembered it, Ray continued, “I can’t in good conscience graduate you from here and say that you’re ready to fly a four-engine bomber with ten human beings on board - I’m just not going to do it. If you can’t find that field, then just go get your things and you’re through with the Air Force unless there’s some other post you want here, but it isn’t going to be flying, it’s not going to be as a pilot.”

McGovern thought about all the work he had put in, all that time, and about how Ray was one of his good friends from college, and here he was telling McGovern that he was all through. He couldn’t believe that Ray was going to do this to him. He looked at Ray again and could not detect any yield or compassion.  Ray asked McGovern a couple of questions about his instruments, “sort of elementary ones,” McGovern recalled. Then it clicked. McGovern remembered what he had been taught and what he needed to do, “and after the second question I knew exactly how to do it.” He set a heading, “and boy was I glad when the lights started to twinkle ahead and I could see those runways coming up out of the darkness.”

It was just as Ray had warned, hard flying. “I can’t recall once that he ever let his guard down.” At a function after the war, Ray told Eleanor that “all I was trying to do was to keep George alive in combat. I figured that the harder I rode him, the better his chances of surviving missions over enemy targets.”11 For Lt. John Smith, transition school was at Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama.  There he immediately learned that the B-24 was “a giant step up” from the airplanes he had flown in advanced training. His instructor was Lt. Robert Baskerville. Smith rode together with three other pilots, taking turns at the controls. Baskerville said it saved time and gave them a chance to learn from the other guys’ mistakes. They began by learning how to take off and how to land, mainly by doing touch-and-go landings until Baskerville was satisfied they were not going to kill him or themselves, then went on to cross-country navigation flights.

Smith’s second cross-country flight “was the most important trip of my life.” Baskerville arranged a trip from Maxwell Field to Mitchell Field, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to pick up a bomb bay load of beer. Smith called his girl friend, nineteen-year-old JoAnn Stanton of Chicago, and arranged to meet her during the beer run. She was there. He asked her to marry him. To his surprise and joy, she said yes.12 After completing transition school at Liberal, McGovern moved on to Lincoln, Nebraska. It was mainly a holding base and Eleanor recalls it as “the one fun time we had” during their nomadic times from 1943 to 1944. George was doing no flying and aside from his ground school classes in first aid, “global sanitation and hygiene,” and other things, he had free time. Eleanor’s twin sister, Ila, came down from South Dakota for a visit. Eleanor lived in yet another rented room while George lived in the barracks.

To his friend in the Army, Bob Pennington, now stationed in England, McGovern wrote, “I should have gotten married a year ago. I don’t see how anyone could be any happier than Eleanor and I are. When we’re together on weekends, the time just seems to race away.” A week later he wrote, “Having her here has really made an awfully big improvement in my morale. Of course those days when I can’t see her go by pretty slowly, but then all the days were like that before we got married. Eleanor seems to be happier than she has been since I’ve known her, so things are really working out swell for us. If being married under the handicap of a war is so wonderful - it must be nothing short of marvelous in peace time.  Bob, let’s hurry up and get this thing over with so we can really start living again.”13 At Lincoln, McGovern found out who was on his crew. The commanding officer called all the pilots together and gave them a list of the crews they would have, with the man’s name, the position he was going to fly, his age, and the town he was from. McGovern drew Sgt. Isador Irving Seigal as his tail gunner.  Other gunners were Sgt. William “Tex” Ashlock from Hereford, Texas; Sgt. Robert O’Connell, nose gunner from Brattleboro, Vermont; and Sgt. William McAfee, ball turret gunner from Port Huron, Michigan. (“I always thought the ball turret was the most terrifying place to ride on that plane,” McGovern later said. “You’re just suspended there above the earth in a glass compartment.” One compensation: the ball turret gunner had a fabulous view.) Sgt. Ken Higgins was the radio operator.

All these men were sergeants because the AAF learned early that when the crews of the B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force bailed out over enemy territory and were taken prisoner (although many of them managed to evade and escape the Germans via Spain thanks to the French underground), the stalags where they were imprisoned were run by theLuftwaffe . It was German practice to treat sergeants who became POWs different from and better than corporals or privates.  Further,Luftwaffe chief Hermann GÕring, who had a romantic view of the “knights of the sky” after his World War I experience as an ace, insisted that the stalags holding downed airmen be superior to stalags that held infantry. So the AAF decided that any man who flew over enemy territory should be a sergeant or an officer.

Sgt. Mike Valko was listed as McGovern’s flight engineer. He was from Bridgeport, Connecticut. McGovern was startled when he saw Valko’s age - thirty-three - and thought, There is no way an old guy like that is going to listen to me (McGovern was twenty-one). That day McGovern started growing a beard and a mustache so that he would look older.  Lt. Sam Adams, from Milwaukee, would be McGovern’s navigator-bombardier (by this stage of the war, the two functions were done by one man). Lt. Bill Rounds would be the co-pilot.

McGovern knew their names, ages, and hometowns, but he had not yet met them.

Meanwhile he and Eleanor had a bit of a chance to enjoy married life.  One thing, though: she wanted to get pregnant. He asked her, “Eleanor, don’t you think that it would be better to wait until the war is over?” He was going into combat. He thought he would have thirty-five missions to fly and that there was a good chance he might not come home.* There was also a chance that he might, but considering the casualties the Eighth Air Force was sustaining, which were growing alarmingly close to nearly one half of the combat crews, it was a shaky proposition. In addition, her father had told George he hoped the two of them were not thinking about bringing a child into the world when George was going into combat. But that same point was a motivation for Eleanor. As he said a half century later, “If there was any doubt at all about my coming back she wanted to be sure that she had a child, a part of me.”

To Bob Pennington, McGovern wrote that “Eleanor’s never even breathed a whimper or complaint of any kind. I’ve never known a person like her. She will never stop going up in my estimation. I love her more every time another day goes by.  I really believe we’ll be more in love and more romantic on our golden wedding anniversary than we are now. Ain’t love grand?”14 Then he thought, Well, if that is what she wants, why not? She has followed me to every post I’ve been at, every time I moved she’s been willing to be there and if this is what she wants, so be it. She said it was what she wanted and that now was the time to do it. He decided to go ahead, and it was done.  McGovern wrote Pennington after Eleanor became pregnant, “I’m proud of the prospect of being a dad, Bob. It’s one of the warmest and best feelings I’ve ever had. Eleanor is happier than I’ve ever seen her before.”15 Lt. Walter Shostack, like McGovern, learned to fly a B-24 in Liberal, Kansas, then went on to Lincoln, Nebraska, to meet his crew. They consisted of a tail gunner from Lubbock, Texas, Bob Brewer; an engineer named Jack Keppo from Roswell, New Mexico; a radio operator, Alexander Dubbets, from Akron, Ohio; an ex-Canadian pilot named Charles C. Shrapshire III as the belly gunner; a navigator from Illinois, Lijo Strander, Jr., who insisted on being called Joe; a bombardier from Dover, Delaware, named Edward “Eddie” Rider; and a co-pilot from Windsor, Connecticut, named Joseph Delinski. Shostack was a Russian immigrant.  Wherever they came from, they were all in the AAF now, and that fact was paramount. They, and other airmen, struck Shostack as “a cross section of the United States. They were good and bad and stupid and bright and immoral and moral, each slice of humanity.” But, he added, “the one lesson we all learned was that you took care of your buddy because he was going to take care of you.” They trained together with McGovern and his crew and hundreds of others at Mountain Home, Idaho. It was during this training that Shostack lost one of his high school classmates, Richard Schorn, when Schorn flew his B-24 into the side of a mountain, a not-uncommon hazard.16 Lieutenant Roland Pepin, the navigator, joined his crew at March Field in Riverside, California. The men came from all parts of the country. From the time they got together, “we lived, slept, ate, worked, and played together. We would share our lives until death or the war’s end.” Nineteen-year-old Pepin was the youngest member. Lieutenant Duncan was twenty-six years old. To Pepin that seemed “ancient,” but the two men formed a close bond. “Duncan liked to drink,” Pepin recalled, “and I didn’t, so I made sure he kept out of trouble.” They flew training missions all around the California coast and out over the Pacific. All the crew practiced their individual skills, bombing runs, takeoffs and landings, air-to-air gunnery, navigation, radio work, and whatever else it took to make them combat-ready. After some months of this they got orders to go to Europe. First, though, they had a ten-day leave. Eight of them pooled their money and went to a resort at Lake Arrowhead, where Pepin said they “had a first-class bang-up time. We lived as kings and crammed all the pleasures one could have into our last fling before joining the battle. Duncan, who had a lot of manly experience, rewarded his young watchdog (me) by making sure I learned about life quickly. I fell in love at Lake Arrowhead. I fell in love several times in California before it was time to say goodbye to Chris, Susan, Lori, and Amy.”17 It was critical for each crew to develop and maintain a close bond. They lived together, sergeants in one place, the officers in another. Irritating habits could magnify and ruin their relationship, things like their accents, the music they liked, the curse words they used, their taste in women and liquor and books or comics, their politics, their bragging or their being unusually modest, their way of washing or brushing their teeth, the way they wore their clothes, the packages they received from home, how they played sports or which sport they liked, their jokes, what made them laugh or cry, anything and everything.  They were on their way to being men at war. They would need to have a closeness unknown to civilians, no matter what the civilians did. Their lives would be at stake. Every one of them had to depend, absolutely, on everyone else doing his job right. They had to not only get along with one another but also to have unquestioning faith in each other. Yet they were thrown together. Before being assigned to their crew, most if not all of them had never known anyone else in their airplane. All they had in common was being in the AAF, an unquenchable desire to fly, a never or seldom spoken patriotism, and - overwhelmingly - being young. Most were twenty-two years old or younger.  Lt. Donald Kay, a bombardier, met his crew at Biggs Field, El Paso, Texas, in April 1944. The co-pilot assigned to the plane was a married man but “he was trying to set a record for sex in his first week and scared the hell out of the rest of the crew.” The sergeants got together and came to Kay and the navigator to ask them to tell the pilot that the co-pilot had to go. They gladly did so and shortly thereafter he was replaced. One of the waist gunners was an alcoholic “and we dumped him too.” The crew, as finally assembled, came from Kansas (pilot), Illinois (co-pilot), Indiana (navigator), Connecticut (Kay, the bombardier), and the sergeants from Wisconsin, Mississippi, New York, West Virginia, and New Jersey.