“All right,” he said, “here are your plane assignments,” and began reading off the names of the pilots and the numbers of the planes they would be flying into Yugoslavia. Our group was always briefed together, which meant that there were forty-eight pilots assembled in the church that morning. The 94th Squadron had twenty-five pilots in it, but no more than sixteen of us went up on any mission, four flights — White, Red, Blue, and Yellow — with four P-38s in each flight. Today, only fourteen of us were going, in flights of four, four, three, and three. Not every pilot had the same plane assigned to him for every strike, but Ace and I were lucky in that respect, flying the identical plane each time, a privilege usually reserved only for senior pilots. (We naturally considered those airplanes our own, and were terribly annoyed when they were assigned to other pilots for a mission we were not flying.) On both nacelles of Ace’s airplane, he had painted four spread playing cards, all aces, and the name Aces High stenciled in a semicircle above them. My plane was called Tyler’s Luck, a bastardization of the comic strip Tim Tylers Luck, and the design on my engines featured blond Tim and black-haired Spud, both grinning. Anyway, since Ace and I knew which planes we’d be flying, we stopped listening again, until the major said, “Check your timepieces,” and then hesitated, watching the sweep-hand, and then said, “It’s oh-eight-seventeen, good luck, gentlemen,” which we never felt he really meant.
Captain Kepler, who had been assigned squadron leader for this mission, gave us a brief talk outside the church, telling us what altitude he wanted to fly at to rendezvous, and setting our courses and speeds. He told us again that he didn’t want any noise until we were over the target, and then he looked at his watch, said, “Okay, guys,” and walked off to get a second cup of coffee in the mess hall. Ace and I went to the latrine because this would be our last opportunity to do so (we rarely used the pilot’s relief tube) until sometime this afternoon. Then he went for his good luck cup of coffee, and I went back to the tent to dress.
The weather was still mild on the ground, but it would be something like eighty degrees below zero outside the airplane at 30,000 feet, and even though the P-38 was equipped with a heating tube, the temperature in the cockpit rarely rose to above fifty-five degrees. The Air Force also had a heated flying suit complete with an electric plug that fit into a cockpit jack, but the suit shrank when you washed it, and as a result only the smallest guys in the squadron flew in anything like heated comfort. So I always wore long johns, over which I pulled on a pair of khaki pants and shirt, and then coveralls, and then my leather fleece-lined jacket. I never wore the leather helmet because it got too uncomfortable on a long flight, preferring the poplin instead. I took very good care of my hands and my feet because those were the parts of the body that really began to ache after a while (those and the coccyx; you were sitting on the valve of a Mae West throughout the entire mission). I had bought a pair of fleece-lined boots from a British officer for twenty bucks, and those were what I wore on each raid, together with a pair of woolen, flannel-lined, sweater-cuffed GI gloves. Still, my hands and feet were always cold.
Sergeant Balson was standing alongside the plane when I came up to the flight line at about eight-thirty. He had already started her, and he stood listening to the engines now, bald head cocked to one side, the way my mother used to listen, though the crew chief was not the slightest bit deaf. Hands on hips, wearing coveralls and a wool cap, he kept listening to the engines as I approached, and then, without a word of greeting, said, “She seems to be warming up slowly, sir, missing a few times, but she’s sound, don’t worry. The left engine throttle lever is loose. And the trim-tab on the right is pulling a little hard.”
“Anything else, Ballsy?”
“That’s it, sir, have a good flight.”
“Thank you. See you later.”
“Right, sir.”
I went up the ladder onto the wing. The P-38 was not a small airplane. It weighed 17,500 pounds combat-loaded and 14, 100 pounds when the cannon and machine guns were taken out of the nose for an unarmed weather recon flight. Either way, it was a huge hunk of machinery for one man to take into the air, and I always climbed into that cockpit with a sense of apprehension, knowing that my full concentration would be demanded for the next several hours, and knowing that I would come back to the field with a pounding headache. The P-38 cruised at close to 270 miles an hour, as fast as the Mustang or the Thunderbolt, except at high altitudes, and even though I rarely experienced a sense of speed in the air (all of us were weaving over the bombers at the same speed, throttles set), I nonetheless recognized that I was hurtling through the sky at very high velocity, especially when we passed a stationary cloud mass and the point was suddenly and forcefully driven home, and I knew that the only things keeping me aloft were those twin 1600 horsepower Allisons and my own intelligence. So I constantly listened to every sound, reacted to every vibration, every alien ping, knowing instantly if an engine was missing or an instrument was off, preparing to deal with any malfunction that threatened to drop me to the ground — and that alone could give a man a goddamn headache, even if he didn’t have the Luftwaffe and the flak to worry about.