You clip your oxygen mask into place and begin climbing to 28,000 feet. The sun warms your face and shoulders, but outside it is sixty below zero and the lower half of your body, in the shadows, is already cold and stiff. The small cabin heater keeps your right foot warm but your left foot is numb. You're sitting on that damned dinghy which is a genuine pain in the ass. The cabin isn't pressurized and at 30,000 feet you fatigue easily. You adjust your silk scarf, making sure its edges are higher than the rough collar of your leather jacket. You'll be looking back constantly to check your tail. "The German who gets you is the one that you'll never see." That's been drummed into us from the first day of squadron training.
We cross the North Sea, following the group leader in the lead formation whose responsibility is to get us to the rendezvous point with the bombers we will be escorting. The bombers take different routes to avoid flak concentrations. Exactly on time, flak begins drumming up at us. Without even looking down, you know you are over the Frisian Islands, off the Dutch coast. They always fire four-burst patterns that hit at the same moment. Over Dummer Lake, farther south, they fire vertical clusters at increasing altitudes. Once you know the flak patterns in various places, you can practically navigate by them. You can't hear the flak exploding over the drone of your engines; and if you ever do hear it, you'll probably be blasted.
We pick up our bombers southwest of the Zuyder Zee, three boxes of lumbering B-24s, and provide top cover. The bombers chug along at 200 mph, while we, going at twice that speed, weave back and forth above them, staying alert for any bogies diving at us from above. The bomber boys claim to be winning the war by blasting German industry to rubble; while we claim to be winning it by an almost ten to one kill ratio over the Luftwaffe. Big egos are at work on both sides, although until recently we were not allowed to go lower than 12,000 feet to chase German fighters. Stick with those bombers, were the standing orders. So, we're not exactly fond of bomber boys, but we respect their guts. They take a terrible pounding, and when one bomber goes down, ten crewmen buy the farm.
You know how it is going to be for this bomber box this day. They're in the second or third wave, hitting fuel storage facilities, and by the time they reach the target there will be a dark cloud hanging in the sky, looking just like a thundercloud-old flak smoke-and those B-24s will fly straight and true, lining up their bomb sights on the target, disappearing into that black cloud to catch hell. There's nothing they can do about it. And after they drop their bombs and begin to turn toward safety… that's when they get bounced by the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts. Then those bomber boys worship us fighter jocks.
You stay alert, checking the skies above and behind. You're over German soil now, the most likely place to be bounced. On your right is a P-51D, the latest model, with six fifty-caliber machine guns instead of the usual four, and a slightly faster and more maneuverable airplane. Daddy Rabbit is painted over the engine cowling. The airplane is flown by Capt. Charles Peters, a buddy from New Orleans who's flying his last mission. "Daddy Rabbit" is his nickname, and he's agreed to turn that beautiful P-51 D over to you when this mission ends. Tomorrow it will fly as Glamorous Glen III. You keep Daddy close and check his tail almost as often as you check your own, which is why he agreed to let you have his airplane. "I know you, you son of a bitch," he laughs. "You won't let anything happen to me on my last ride. You want my airplane too much." Ol' Daddy is right.
A cloud of dark smoke looms above the target. The bombers head straight for it. One of them suddenly blows up in a fireball of bombs and gasoline. No chutes. You turn and catch a glimpse of hundreds of bomb flashes through the smoke and clouds, a moment of maximum alertness because those bombers will soon be turning and the squadron commander orders us to drop our wing tanks. You can't dogfight with wing tanks. You pull the release cable, but the damnedest thing happens: your tanks drop away but so does Daddy Rabbit. He drops like a damned rock, right out of the formation. Nothing hit him, you're certain of that, but he's falling to earth. You dive after him. "My engine quit," he says. It's one of those moments in war that is so horrible that it's actually funny. Daddy is falling to below 5,000 and you're right with him, on his wing, and the flak is coming up. His last mission and he's about to auger in. "Christ, I'm thinking about leaving this thing," he says. "Hold off," I tell him. "I'm gonna ride in that thing tomorrow. Let's figure this out." We go around the instrument panel, checking every possibility, while the damned ground fills the windshield. Machine gun tracers are flashing by.
"Hey, what about your fuel mixture? Go to emergency rich and see what happens." He does, and his engine suddenly comes alive, ol' Daddy zooms upstairs as fast as that Packard Merlin will carry his homeward-bound butt. "I must've accidentally knocked back my mixture control when I pulled the wing tank release cable," he says when he can talk again. It was a close call, but we laugh about it. "Damn it, Daddy, you park that thing and hand over the keys." My voice is shaky, too.
No enemy fighters are sighted this day, but no combat mission is ever routine, by definition, the outcome of any mission is unknown until you safely land, and often the worst part is making it home in terrible weather, sometimes in a crippled airplane, fighting against fatigue and exhaustion. It's early afternoon when you drop down to 3,500 feet above the North Sea and unfasten your oxygen mask. The cabin stinks of gas, oil, and your own sweaty body. You've got a headache and you're starved. You reach for a D ration chocolate bar that's hard as a brick from the cold. You use the side of your jaw to bite into it, and it tastes wonderful. Those damned gravelcrunchers back at the base already had their lunch, and by the time we land the chow hall will be closed. We have an hour of mission debriefing with the intelligence officers before we are off for the day. By then it will be three-thirty. If it isn't raining and we aren't too tired, we'll pedal off on our bikes to Yoxford and fill up on fish and chips. The chow hall situation always pisses us, but we're usually worse to deal with when we come back without scoring any victories.
You're about forty miles from the British coast when you call in and request a compass steer. Sometimes Leiston is so socked in that we land at other fields. Bud Anderson was once forced to land at a bomber base that had the luxury of fifty feet of visibility, he came in, leading a flight of four, groping for the runway lights, when he saw two Flying Fortresses directly ahead and below. He almost landed right on them. It can be terrifying, but you get used to it; like a motorist who makes it home safely in terrible weather, you just forget about it the minute you walk in the door. Anyway, you know the surrounding countryside like the back of your hand, so you line up your descent with landmarks like a lighthouse or a road or a plowed field. When it's really bad visibility, they shoot up flares and you corkscrew down to the edge of the runway. The miracle is we've only lost one guy landing-a stupid accident. He came in after finishing his last mission, shouted over his radio, "Tell Ma I'm coming home." He did a victory roll over the field and augered into a tree.
This time you've got a hundred yards of visibility and a light crosswind-a piece of cake. You taxi up to the hardstand, where Sergeant Webber is waiting, and turn off the engine. You see his disappointed look when he glances at the gun ports which are still taped shut. Another dry run. Your twenty-first mission since returning to combat without encountering an enemy airplane. It's like hunting for six hours in the woods and not even seeing a damned chipmunk. But you crawl out of that cockpit as stiff and tired as if you had taken on the whole damned Luftwaffe. Tomorrow, you might bag three or become a German's victory, but the routine of these long, tiring days is always the same. Yet, you enjoy it. Hard to believe, maybe, and harder to explain, but you really do.