Mission by Robert Matzen

Author:Robert Matzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paladin Communications
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

25

JANUARY ON THE RHINE

It took days for Jim to hear details of Kane’s ditching in the North Sea. Copilot Charlie Clemens had died on impact, as had the two waist gunners. The ball turret gunner had drowned, mistaking the top turret for the top escape hatch. Jim learned some of this by visiting navigator Joe Reus in a hospital down in Salisbury where he sat with two broken wrists from impact. But statistics showed that Kane was a hero for setting his plane into the water in such a way that six out of ten survived. What had Jim been doing at twenty-two? Was he a sophomore at Princeton? Or a junior maybe? He certainly wasn’t making split-second decisions to save or cost lives as these boys now were doing.

Jim thought it ironic that he heard P-47 Thunderbolts flying over Tibenham as he began another letter to a parent, since said letter concerned Barry Shillito of the ship once named Pissed Off. Jim smiled to himself remembering the origin of its replacement name, Our Baby. But when they had gone down, Ollie Saunders’ crew had been in another ship, Liberty Belle, the ship that had slid into Jim’s place in the formation on the Mannheim mission after Tenovus had developed engine trouble.

Thunderbolts had the habit of buzzing Tibenham’s runways and tower later in the day after all the heavies had landed. They would roar past in groups of four just above the deck, their bellies skimming within feet of any Nissen hut sitting out in the open to wake up the dozing bomber boys. The guys at Tibenham loved the show, just as they loved their “little friends” for riding shotgun on the missions into enemy country, and obviously those hotshot pilots had a grand time with their unofficial exercises, and no question it was to razz their friends like Minor, Rhoney, and Shillito.

Nearby, Gil Fisher fed coal to the fire of their stove; Jim had more letters to write. The day before, Wednesday, January 5, Victor Smith’s crew of Gremlins Roost had been flying in the Tail-end Charlie position of the formation on a mission to Kiel. Tail-end Charlie was a dreaded spot because of the terrible prop wash and because German fighters pounced from the rear, and that’s where they got Gremlins Roost, firing into the No. 3 engine until the wing caught fire. The bandits always went for No. 3 because this engine controlled the hydraulics of the Liberator, and once the hydraulics were gone deep in enemy territory, as with the Gremlin, the ship was all too easy to finish off.

Wednesday the fifth had been a tough day all around. The Eighth Air Force was losing its head of Bomber Command, Gen. Ira Eaker, replaced by Jimmy Doolittle, now a lieutenant general. Nobody knew exactly what the change in leadership would mean in the air, but word was that Gen. Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, wanted more action and fewer excuses about weather and mechanical problems from his “Mighty Eighth.

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