Bomber Pilot by Philip Ardery

Author:Philip Ardery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

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* A fine example of the attitude of Romanians was Princess Caterina Caradja, who protected a number of American airmen on her estate near Ploesti until their liberation by friendly forces.

5

The Air War of Western Europe

Once again in England there was much rearrangement work to be done in order to get the group in shape to fly as a proper part of the Eighth Air Force. It was evident that the days of Ted's Flying Circus were gone. The group was merged into a large bombing organization that would not permit operation as a small strike force moving wherever current need directed. The circus was through, though the blood and spirit of its men had marked the progress of the war from El Alamein to Bizerte and from the Carpathians of Romania to the Alpine foothills of Austria.

I was glad to see my friends of the old group who had been left behind us at the base in England. I was sick and weak from dysentery and loss of weight, and there was still the pain aching inside me at the loss of Fowble and his crew. Four months before they'd been a bunch of kids, and since that time they had lost completely the youthful facade which tears so easily in combat. Now their lives were ended, but they had inflicted grievous damage on the enemy and paid a thousandfold interest on the labor and expense of their training. Circumstances had doubtless combined in similar ways many times during this war. But to me the case of this crew was different. At the least it was in the highest category of magnificent and patriotic behavior.

The days succeeding my arrival brought in the stragglers. Captain Frank Ellis and his crew had still not arrived. Frank had brought home a ship on one of the last raids in Africa that was so shot to pieces he had to leave it where it landed. Consequently, he had to depend on Air Transport Command to get him and his crew back. His old ship had borne the letter E—E for Ellis, we called it. It had hurt Frank to leave that ship. “Never mind,” I told him. “When you get back to England you'll have a new E for Ellis; I promise you the next new airplane we get.” When I got in there was a new Liberator waiting for delivery to my squadron. I gave the order to paint the large E on the tail. It was parked in Frank's old parking place, where I knew he would be glad to see it.

The other ships were cleaned up in a hurry. We had to get right into operations because bad weather for flying is the normal thing in the English winter, and we had to take fullest advantage of the remaining good weather of late fall.

In the time we had been operating in England before the group had bombed a couple of airfields in France, but we had never crossed the border of the Reich.

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