Most Honorable Son by Gregg Jones

Author:Gregg Jones [Jones, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2024-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MÜNSTER RAID, Ben was once again interviewed and written up by combat correspondents. A number of US newspapers ran a photograph of a smiling Ben holding his shattered turret dome. He seemed nonchalant about his latest brush with death, but his big smile for the camera concealed his physical and mental exhaustion. He had logged 265.5 hours of flight in thirty combat missions over the past eleven months, and he was drained. “I wanted to come home,” Ben later recalled. “That was enough.”11

Ben’s separation from the Eighth Air Force took the rest of November, and he was present for some of the grimmest days the 93rd would experience during that bleak autumn. In a raid into Germany only eight days after Ben completed his tour, the 93rd lost five Liberators to enemy fire and had forty-three men killed. Seven were taken prisoner.

As the gray month wore on, Ben was poked and prodded by doctors, analyzed by mental health experts, and debriefed by intelligence officers. He drank and danced and wept with his brothers-in-arms who were still trying to complete their own combat tours. He visited his favorite haunts in Norwich and London, then he bade farewell to his comrades.

In late November, Ben and about a dozen other Eighth Air Force men who had recently completed their combat tours received orders to report to an English port—in all likelihood, Liverpool—for their passage home. Arriving by train, they boarded a New York City–bound troop ship whose passengers included shattered American airmen suffering from combat-related neuroses. Steaming away from the River Mersey docks on December 1, 1943, out into the Irish Sea, Ben set off for America.12

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