18

A  NEARSIGHTED  WAIST  GUNNER  FLIES  AGAIN

            On two separate occasions in my life the United States Government has accorded me the honor of flying in a B-17 bomber.  The first invitation came when I was a spindly, nearsighted teenager with an abdominal hernia.  And then, 44 years later, as a Capitol Hill aide, still nearsighted but by then sporting a modest little tummy, I was invited to fly in another B-17.  The second invitation was far more desirable for a number of reasons.

            This time, for example, nobody forced me, time after time, to march naked, except for an overcoat, past dozens of giggling young women.  But before delving further into those anguishing episodes, let us consider a bit of aeronautical history.         

            For those of you who arrived on this planet too recently to know what a B-17 is, much less why anybody would want to fly in one,  I respectfully refer you to the late, late show almost anywhere in America.  There, before long, you are bound to see such old-time stars as Gregory Peck, Clark Gable or Steve McQueen heroically flying one of these beautiful old airplanes which belong, alas, to another, nobler era in American history.           

            By any measure the most famous warplane in World War II, the B-17 was a magnificent metal monster with four engines and a hundred-foot wing.  Bristling with thirteen fifty-caliber machine guns, it was known as the Flying Fortress.  It  carried ten young men who, usually only a year or so before, were movie ushers, farm boys, college students and soda jerks who had received what some of us regarded as a crash course, so to speak, in flight training.  Then, to their astonishment, they found themselves five miles high over Germany, being kept alive by oxygen hoses in sort of an airborne deep freeze, battling Messerschmitts and plowing through malignant black clouds of flak while dropping bombs on railroad yards, oil refineries, tank factories and occasionally, through error, potato farms. 

            High in this surreal, sub-zero world where few men before had dared even to venture, must less wage war, droned thousands of these old airplanes.  To focus the fire from their machine guns, the planes flew clustered together like puppies seeking warmth.  So tight were these bomber formations that pilots dared not relax for an instant.  So tense and demanding was their task that they soaked their underclothes with sweat even as ice crystallized on their oxygen masks. They knew that even a moment’s inattention at the controls might mean a collision with that other B-17--the one flying just fifty feet ahead and fifty feet off their wing.  At the target, the bombardier took over and each formation was forced to fly straight and level at a constant speed for several terrifying minutes that seemed to take hours.  Nazi flak gunners knew that once the Fortresses began their bomb run, they were committed not to vary their course, altitude or speed.  This allowed the flak batteries to calculate with mathematical precision exactly where to fire the next barrage of 88- or 105-millimeter shells.

            Thus these B-17’s, along with B-24 Liberators and many other types of bombers and fighters, fought a war that is unique today and will remain so forever.  Never before in history had such vast armadas of airplanes waged such monumental battles in the sky.  Nor ever again, now that a single thermonuclear missile can set fire to an area the size of Delaware, will man meet man in such titanic aerial conflict.  

            For their role in helping achieve victory in Europe, American B-17’s and their crews paid a terrible price.  A total of 12,731 Flying Fortresses were built.  Of these, about 4,750 were lost in combat.  Each carried a pilot, co-pilot, engineer, bombardier, navigator, radio operator and four gunners.

            In its day, the B-17 was a technological marvel.  Today it is largely a museum piece.  To the kids weaned on Star Wars, these antique airplanes must seem as dated as the awkward machine Wilbur and Orville coaxed into the air in 1903 at Kitty Hawk.  Luke Skywalker fans probably would smile patronizingly at a plane which had four old-timey gasoline engines, driving quaint, fan-like devices called propellers, which engineers in those days believed was necessary to make an airplane fly.  Amusing to today’s youngsters, too, would be the contrast between a Flying Fortress, plodding along at 165 m.p.h. with a dozen five-hundred pound bombs, and one of our modern jet fighters.  Today an F-18 or F-16, flown by a lone pilot, can carry twice the bomb load, twice as high and three times as fast.  But to me, performance figures don’t tell the whole story.  To the guys who entrusted their lives to her and survived, the B-17 will always be the most magnificent airplane ever built. 

            In 1987, when Jim Wright became Speaker and I was given a small office in the Capitol, my friend Colonel Frank (Mick) McKeown, an Air Force liaison officer, came in with a magnificent gift--a color print of Fortresses Under Fire, personally inscribed to me by the artist, Keith Ferris.  The print was taken from the great  B-17 mural that occupies an entire wall at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.  But even as a dedicated B-17 groupie with this picture dominating my office wall, I never expected the phone call I got one day in the autumn of 1988.    

            On the line was Major General Roger P. Scheer, a fighter pilot with 160 combat missions in Vietnam and more decorations than the National Christmas Tree, including three Silver Stars and four Distinguished Flying Crosses.  Before being summoned to duty in the Pentagon,  Roger Scheer had commanded the 301st Fighter Wing, a Reserve unit based at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth.  There he had become friends with my brother, Chief Master Sergeant Jimmy Lynam, who had diligently supervised maintenance of the F-105 Thunderchiefs in the 301st.  In a casual conversation one day, Jimmy mentioned that his brother Marshall had flown as a B-17 waist gunner back in the big war. 

            Later, after Roger Scheer was promoted to Major General and assigned to the Pentagon as Chief of the Air Force Reserve, I occasionally worked with him on legislative matters on the Hill.  He appreciated this, I’m sure.  But I am convinced that if it had not been for his friendship and respect for Jimmy Lynam, I would never have received such an astonishing invitation.       

            “Would you like to take a flight in a B-17?” he asked.

            “In a what?”

            “In a B-17.  Completely reconditioned.  Just like it was in combat.  It’s a long story.  If you’re interested, I’ll tell you about it.”

            Dumbfounded, it took me a few seconds to react.  I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had invited me to take a quick hop in The Spirit of St. Louis.  As far as I knew, there were only four or five B-17’s, in various states of airworthiness,  left in the world.   But a completely reconditioned B-17?  Stunned at the offer, I nevertheless accepted quickly--so quickly, in fact, that General Scheer failed to mention, er, uh, a few small facts.

            For example, I don’t remember his telling me that the particular B-17 on which I was being invited to ride had been purchased by the U.S. Air Force for 20 cents.

            Twenty cents?  That’s right.  In 1971, after negotiations with the French government, the U.S. Air Force was given title to the skeletonized hulk of this airplane.  Long since stripped of its engines and salvageable parts, the plane had been sitting for ten years, cannibalized and forgotten, on a remote airfield north of Paris.  For what the French undoubtedly regarded as a pile of useless aeronautical junk, they agreed to sell for a token price of one franc--about 20 cents.

            But even more astonishing than the price was the history of this fabulous airplane.  Little by little, from General Scheer and from an absorbing feature article entitled Song of a Valiant Lady by Nathan M. Adams in the March, 1986, issue of The Reader’s Digest, I learned the whole story.

            This airplane, rolled out of the Boeing plant in Seattle in January, 1944, turned out to be Shoo Shoo Baby, second perhaps only to The Memphis Belle as the most famous Flying Fortress of World War II.   

            Flown across the Atlantic to join the growing American air armada in England, Shoo Shoo Baby performed with such grace and stability in flight she captured the heart of the first Eighth Air Force pilot to fly her, 2nd Lt. Paul G. McDuffee.  After taking her on 16 missions, half of them deep into Germany, he was convinced that this was a very special airplane indeed.  But then McDuffee, having completed his tour of 30 missions, returned to the States.  Shoo Shoo Baby was assigned to another crew, with 1st Lt. Robert J. Guenther as pilot.  Despite her reputation as a lucky airplane, Guenther had an ominous feeling.  Was she too lucky?  Could she be overdue for a change in her unbroken streak of good fortune? His foreboding turned out to be justified.               

            On May 29, Guenther flew Shoo Shoo Baby on a raid against a Focke-Wulf fighter assembly plant in Posen, Poland.  First an engine overheated and had to be feathered.  Then, over the target, a burst of flak shook the plane and another engine started gushing oil, splattering the cockpit windows.  This engine, too, had to be shut down. 

            With the two remaining engines pushed to the limit, Shoo Shoo Baby managed to drop her bombs on the target.  But then, turning off the bomb run, she began to lose altitude.  A third engine began to fail.

            Realizing he could never get the plane back to England, Lieutenant  Guenther turned on a course toward neutral Sweden.  Fighting to stay barely 1,000 feet above the waves of the Baltic, he skillfully brought the crippled craft to a harrowing but safe landing near Malmo.  Five months later, Lieutenant Guenther and his crew were flown to Scotland and freed.  But in the meantime, the Swedish government had negotiated with U.S. authorities to purchase the severely-damaged bomber for $1.  They repaired the plane and converted it to an airliner.  Seven months after the war in Europe ended in May, 1945, Shoo Shoo Baby, in her new identity as Danish Airlines Flight 1750, developed landing gear trouble and made a wheels-up crash landing at Blackbushe airfield in England.  

            This time, too, all her occupants escaped injury, and once again the former warplane was hauled in for repairs.  Restored to Danish Airline service the spring of 1946, she pioneered passenger routes to Greenland and Africa and made occasional flights to Moscow.  Then, by the end of 1947, this durable old aircraft underwent yet another metamorphosis.

            At that time the Royal Danish Army and Navy, together with Denmark’s Geodetic Institute, were searching for a long-range aircraft to carry out an extensive photo-mapping project of Greenland’s polar icecap.  Because of her stability, reliability and high-altitude performance, they chose Shoo Shoo Baby.  For this unique mission she was equipped with special cameras, larger fuel tanks and metal shields to protect the fuselage from chunks of ice thrown by the propellers.  In some of the worst flying weather on earth, the tireless four-engined workhorse crosscrossed vast, forbidding areas of the Arctic month after month for the next four years, helping compile the most detailed air survey to date of the storm-swept reaches of northern Greenland.  Her mission done, on October 1, 1953, she was put up for sale.

            After sitting idle and unprotected on a Danish airfield for 16 months, she was purchased by France’s Institut Geographique National for even more high-altitude   

photo-mapping duty.  Between 1956 and 1961, Shoo Shoo Baby mapped Lebanon, Madagascar, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Martinique, Guyana, Gabon and the French Congo.  By this time she had logged an astounding total of 5,500 hours--more than seven months--in the air.  Her reward, at last, was the boneyard.

            By 1968, Shoo Shoo Baby, stripped of her engines, her salvageable parts and her dignity, stood as a forgotten hulk, a weathered aluminum skeleton--wings, fuselage and tail--at the lonely French airfield.  But in another part of the world, an incredible aviation detective story was nearing a climax. 

            From Sydney, Australia, came a telephone call from Steve Birdsall, whose hobby was tracing B-17’s that had survived the war and evaded the scrap heap.  Through painstaking research he had tracked down both Shoo Shoo Baby and her very first pilot, Paul G. McDuffee.  Now a retired insurance broker living in Tampa, McDuffee often had thought about the remarkable airplane he had flown on her first 16 missions.  After his initial astonishment at Birdsall’s call, McDuffee got excited about the discovery and launched an all-out campaign to try to retrieve this aerial ghost from the past.

            Mobilizing the support of former Air Force comrades and veterans groups, McDuffee finally succeeded in persuading the Air Force to negotiate a homecoming for Shoo Shoo Baby.  For the token fee which today would not even buy a U.S. postage stamp, the French government sold the weather-beaten hulk to the U.S. Air Force.  Disassembled and packed in 27 crates, the plane was loaded on a giant C-5A and delivered to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  

            There, in 1978, a dedicated group of Air Force Reserve mechanics undertook the painstaking job of restoring the aircraft to her 1944 identity.  Devoting  50,000 hours of their time, using public and private funds and scrounging parts from other junked B-17’s, the Reservists completed their task in 1988.  By any measure, theirs was a spectacular achievement.    

            With elaborate ceremonies and rousing band music, the reincarnated Shoo Shoo Baby was rolled out of the hangar at Dover Air Force Base on September 10, 1988.  Except for her wartime-style olive drab paint job and the string of bombs stenciled on her nose to represent her combat missions, she probably looked pretty much the way she did when she rolled out of the Boeing plant as a glistening aluminum beauty in 1944.  Even her old serial number, 232076, once again graced her rudder. 

            My wife Eddie and I were guests of General Scheer and wife Sandy for the rollout program.  While I feel sheepish about admitting it, the ceremony evoked a bit more nostalgia than I had counted on.  Only a fool would be sentimental about a war, but I suppose it’s understandable to be sentimental about, well, a friend.  True, I had never seen this particular B-17 before.  But having known a number of her sisters, I felt sort of like a friend of the family.  Only thing was, during the ceremony Eddie thought I might be coming down with a cold.  I had to keep blowing my nose.

            Later that afternoon, with General Scheer and me aboard, Shoo Shoo Baby’s newest flight crew cranked up the first of her four 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines.  To me, there is no sound in the world as distinctive as a B-17 starting its engines--a whine, a tentative sputter, a couple of coughs and then a thunder that seems to shake the earth.  Like a long-forgotten song, the roar of the engines magically rolled back the years and stirred deep-rooted memories--a few sad, a few funny...

            The time was December, 1943.  The place was the Army Reception Center at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.

            “What you want to do in the Army, soldier?” asked the sergeant.

            “I don’t know.  I’ve never given it much thought.”

            “Well, you got any particular skills?  Automobile mechanic, maybe?”

             “No, but I’ve studied a little radio.  I took a correspondence course and built some radios, and things like that.”

            “Aha!” cried the sergeant.  “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

            “Could you put me in the Signal Corps?”

            “Nope, the Signal Corps is all full up.  They’re not taking any more men right now.  You know how to do anything else?”

            I shrugged.  “Well, I don’t know, then.  What do you think?”

            “How about the Air Force?  The Air Force uses a lot of radio operators.”

            “Sounds OK to me.  I could do radio repairs or something like that.”

            The sergeant’s face clouded and he shook his head.  “Well, we got a little problem here.  The Air Force is not taking any more enlisted men.  The only way you can get in the Air Force these days is to sign up as a flying cadet.”

            “That lets me out, I guess.  I’m pretty nearsighted.  I work as a movie projectionist, and I’ve always had to wear glasses to keep the screen in focus.”           

            “Where are your glasses now?”

            “I threw them away when they drafted me.  I didn’t figure I’d have to focus very many movie projectors in the Army.”

            The sergeant leaned over and lowered his voice.  “Look,” he whispered.  “There’s a way we can do this.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Simple.  I sign you up for flying cadet training, right?  That puts you in the Air Force.  I send you to Sheppard Field for basic training.  Half way through basic training, you go to your CO and say, ‘Sir, I’ve decided I don’t want to be a flying cadet.’  Then the CO will say, ‘OK, Lynam.  We’ll give you another assignment.’  And then, presto!--they’ll send you to radio school.”

            “Do you really think that will work?”

            “Trust me,” said the sergeant.

            Strangely enough, over the next few weeks things worked out just like the sergeant predicted--up to a point.  The CO did, in fact, tell me that I would be taken off the cadet roster and given another assignment.  Only thing was, he didn’t say what assignment it would be, or when.  In the meantime, I stayed in basic training, which included military discipline, rifle practice, close order drill and, of course, marching around Sheppard Field naked.

            Well, actually not quite naked.  We were permitted to wear our overcoats and GI shoes.  Every week or so, my squadron would be ordered to report to the base hospital for another physical exam.  Since the hospital didn’t have enough room for a hundred men to undress there, we were ordered first to strip naked in our barracks and then to march, like a military unit of parkbench flashers, to the hospital.

            Often our marches took us past base headquarters, where offices were staffed by large numbers of civilian employees--mostly young women.  As icy winds whipped up under my overcoat to chill parts of my anatomy never before exposed to a Texas blue norther, I always devoutly hoped that the pretty typists and stenographers were too busy at their desks to be looking out the window.  Usually they were not.  As we strode resolutely past headquarters on bony, milk-white legs, we stared stonily ahead as legions of young women pressed their noses to the windows and snickered.  Sherman was right.

            At the hospital, while doctors thumped on us with little rubber hammers and peered into various bodily orifices, a few enlisted medical corpsmen amused themselves by scaring the daylights out of the guys waiting in line.  From the base veterinarian one medic had borrowed a gigantic hypodermic syringe used to give injections to horses.  Its needle was about a foot long and the diameter of lead pencil.  Often as GI’s stood in line awaiting their physical exams, the medic would pick up this horrendous instrument and turn to a fellow medic with a question:  “Did Dr. Schwartz want me to give this next guy his injection in his left testicle, or in his right?” On occasion a GI would faint. 

            In an old trunk at home I still have my copy, believe it or not, of a yellowing War Department Form 64, Physical Examination for Flying, in which a Medical Corps doctor at Sheppard Field examined me and concluded that I shouldn’t be allowed to fly, at least on our side.  

            In his report the doctor, one Captain M. L. Goldhamer, didn’t comment on my nearsightedness.  Nor did he mention the hernia I knew I had received in tumbling off a desk when I was a baby.  But he said I was 12 pounds underweight and furthermore,  my aptitude was so low he didn’t even see any need to waste time examining me again later on.  I’m not sure what made him decide I was too inept to fly, but it didn’t really matter to me.  I was bound for radio school, anyhow.  Sure I was. 

            Anyhow, when our troop train arrived at an air base just outside Las Vegas a few weeks later, nobody was more surprised than I to find out that this was a field where the Army Air Force trained gunners to fly on bombers.  The only thing I could figure is that Dr. Goldhamer got so busy asking naked cadets to turn their heads and cough that he accidentally put my report in the wrong file basket.  I felt sure somebody would find it, sooner or later.  All this having happened 54 years ago, however, my confidence is beginning to wane.

            In gunnery school I began to wonder whether, in the interest of the fellows I might be flying with, I ought to tell somebody I couldn’t see very well.  But I figured that my buddies would think I was just scared.  I was, but I knew they were, too.  Besides, I rationalized that if an enemy fighter got close enough to shoot at our plane,  it probably would be close enough for me to see.  I kept quiet.

            After gunnery school the Army Air Force sent me to for air crew training to a field in Alexandria, Louisana, where a flight surgeon promptly discovered my hernia.

            “We can’t let you fly with this,” he said.  “If you ever had to bail out, all your intestines would fall down into another part of your body.”

            “You mean into my--”

            “Yes,” he said. 

            “So what happens now?”

            “We can operate on you and fix the tear in your abdominal wall.  But we will need your permission to operate.”

            “And if I don’t give you permission?”

            “You’ll be taken off flying status and assigned to other duties.” 

            “Can I have a day or so to think about it?”

            “Sure,” said the flight surgeon.  “I’ll just notify your squadron.”

            Back at the barracks I stretched on my bunk, enjoyed a luxurious nap and read magazines for several hours.   About mid-afternoon a sergeant came in.  “Is your name Lynam?” he asked.  I nodded.

            “Come on,” he said.  “Let’s go to the mess hall.”

            “It’s not time for chow, is it?”

            “You’re not going for chow.  You’re going to do KP.”

            “KP?  What are you talking about?” I demanded.  “Flight crews don’t have to do KP.”

            The sergeant waved a piece of paper.  “You’re not on a flight crew any more.

I just got this notice.  You’re being assigned to permanent KP.”

            “Permanent KP?  You mean like, every day?” 

            “That’s right,” he said smugly.

            The choice before me was clear.  Some things in this world are worse than flying in an airplane that people are shooting at.  I turned to the sergeant.  “Before I report to the mess hall,” I said, “do you mind if I run down to the base hospital?  I want to see the flight surgeon for a minute.”

            “Better hurry,” the sergeant said, grinning  triumphantly.  I wondered how many times he had performed this routine.  My surgery went well.  

            A few weeks later I had pretty much recovered and was assigned to a new combat crew.  The pilot was a tall, gangly young man named Samuel E. Holt, Jr.  A Mormon from Salt Lake City, he kept to himself and didn’t talk much.  I remember hoping that he knew more about piloting than I did about gunnery.  Several weeks later, I discovered he did.  He saved our lives. 

            It happened on a practice bombing mission.  Along with about a dozen other B-17’s flown by amateur air crews like ours, we had been ordered out to a remote target range in southern Louisiana to drop ten practice bombs.  These bombs, filled mostly with sand, carried only enough explosive to make a puff of smoke where they hit.  All the planes, including ours, were to fly at 10,000 feet over an oval course, a safe distance apart, and take turns dropping bombs, one at a time, on the clearly defined ground target.  All the planes were under strict orders to fly in a clockwise direction, and all of them did.  Except one.

            On a B-17, the bombardier had a magnificent view of whatever he happened to be trying to destroy.  He sat in a clear Plexiglas bubble in the very nose of the plane.  Just a few feet behind him was a tiny desk where the navigator worked.  This forward compartment was below and completely isolated from the flight deck.  To reach the pilot, co-pilot and engineer, you had to crawl back through a little tunnel under the flight deck and pop up out of the floor.  Everybody was connected to everybody else by interphone, but the forward compartment and the flight deck were two separate little worlds.           

            As always on a bomb run, the bombardier that day had complete control of the plane.  Peering down through the bombsight at the target, he was making minor corrections in our course by turning little knobs of the bombsight.  Completely absorbed in his work, he didn’t see the other airplane.  Neither did the navigator.  Nor, until the very last second, did anybody on the flight deck.  

            Back at my waist gun position toward the rear of the plane, I was gazing out the window, bored stiff.  It was a warm, sunshiny day, but at 10,000 feet with the wind whistling in around the ball turret, it was getting a little chilly.  I sat down on small raised walkway to put on my fleece-lined flying boots.  Then I felt the plane shudder.

            I grabbed the walkway and braced myself.  Instinct told me something very unusual was about to happen, and I was right.  With the bombardier using the bombsight to control the airplane through the autopilot, the pilot had glanced away from the windscreen for just a moment.  When he looked up, twenty men were only seconds from death.  Another B-17 was dead ahead, meeting us head-on at a closing speed of nearly 350 miles an hour.  In one movement, Sam Holt flipped off the autopilot and shoved the control yoke forward.  There was no time to chop the throttles.  We plunged toward the earth like a comet.

            Back in the waist section, all hell broke loose.  Everything not tied down flew into the air and hung there.  As I clung to the walkway, I watched a the Gibson Girl emergency radio float gently through the cabin, followed by a coffee bottle and several interphone headsets.  Then, to my horror, I saw a fifty-caliber machine gum rise eerily from its swivel mount and hang motionless in mid-air, still linked to an ammunition belt.  Months of dirt and grime, having collected in tiny cracks ever since the plane rolled out of the factory, suddenly were no longer held in place by gravity and leaped into the drafty cabin air in weird little swirls.  Virtually paralyzed with fear as the plane plunged downward, I kept hanging to the raised structure where I had taken a seat to put on my boots.  And then I saw the boots.

            From where I had placed them, side by side, on the cabin floor, they now floated gracefully in my direction.  Still sitting upright and side by side, as if beside a bed, they then hung motionless, bathed in a cathedral-like shaft of light from the waist window.  A few feet forward in his radio room, operator Clyde Jontz clung to his small desk and watched his parachute pack float lazily upward through the cabin.  Then, instantly, the parachute, boots, machine guns and everything else slammed into the floor.  I heard the engine power ease off and I felt myself getting so heavy I could barely lift my arms.  As we screamed downward, Sam was trying to pull out.

            Somehow he managed to do it without ripping off the wings.  To me, it was a superb feat of airmanship.  It surely saved everybody on our plane, not to mention the guys flying with that idiot in the other one.  The entire episode cannot have lasted over 10 or 15 seconds, but even today, when I see television pictures of our astronauts frolicking weightlessly in space, I get a spooky feeling.                                   

            The rest of our crew training went very smoothly, unless you count the time a P-63 fighter slammed into a B-17 just off our right wing during a practice mission over Memphis.  Or perhaps I might mention our taking off from Lincoln, Nebraska, without remembering to remove the canvas cover from out pitot tube, thus leaving to sheer guesswork how close we were to stalling speed on our nighttime landing approach.  Then too, there was the occasion when our pilot, Sam Holt, and our navigator, Donald Urry, were given separate briefings for our nighttime flight across the Atlantic.  Only trouble was, one was told that the highest mountain on our course over Greenland was 10,000 feet.  The other was told it was 9,000.  That was the night we successfully demonstrated that a B-17, while big and cumbersome, could be made to climb very swiftly given full military power and quick, fervent prayer. 

            Over the late summer and early fall of 1944, the nine other fellows and I were fused into what the Army Air Force considered an adequately trained combat crew.  Looking back, it’s obvious that we were virtual novices at our jobs.  Even our pilot, Sam Holt, could hardly be called an old pro, even though he had saved our bacon that day over Louisiana and probably other times I didn’t know about.  The average bomber pilot going into combat in those days probably had no more than 450 hours of flying time.  Today a captain for a major airline would be likely to have 20,000 hours, or more than 40 times the experience.  But ready or not, we went to war.

            In November, 1944, we were given a brand-new B-17G and, over the next few days, flew from Grenier Field in Manchester, New Hampshire, to Goose Bay, Labrador; Keflavik, Iceland; Valley, Wales, England; Marrakech, Morocco; Tunis, Tunisia; landing finally in Gioia, Italy.  As a welcoming gesture, 15th Air Force functionaries immediately seized our shiny new airplane and loaded us in the back of a truck.  Over blacked-out roads which seemed to date from the Julius Caesar administration, we rumbled about a hundred miles to the sad, war-torn little town of Foggia, Italy.     

            Dog-tired, cold and hungry, we were given a midnight supper of scrambled eggs.  Then Pete Olivo, our armorer and left waist gunner, asked where we six enlisted men were going to sleep.

            “In that tent,” said a sleepy sergeant,  pointing to an enormous pile of canvas in a corner of the room.  “I’ll show you where you can put it up.”  

            In basic training we learned about pup tents, but this tent seemed to be the size of an auditorium.  Cursing, stumbling over big rocks, untangling ropes and trying to figure out which poles went into which holes in chill black hours before dawn, it’s a miracle we ever got the damn thing up. When daylight came, by looking at other tents, we discovered an ingenious method for heating our new home.

            From a wrecked airplane we got a section of aluminum tubing and connected it to a nifty power source--a barrel of 100-octane aviation gasoline.  The barrel was placed on a wooden stand just outside the tent.  Then we ran the tubing into the tent and crimped the end so the gasoline dripped slowly into a metal pan.  It only took one match to activate the heating system we used all that winter.  When you’re about to be shot at in an airplane, you don’t worry too much about your heating system being dangerous.

            Our airfield was one of a group built around Foggia by the Luftwaffe before the Allies captured southern Italy in 1943.  The outfit we joined, the 97th Bomb Group, shared the field with units of the Royal Air Force.  In good weather, our Fortresses took off early in the morning, usually hit their targets in massive formations around noon, and returned--the lucky ones, that is--about mid-afternoon.  Then, as sunset neared, the RAF bombers began thundering into the sky.  Since our tent was located near the end of the matted steel runway, our eardrums usually took a beating during the late afternoon and early evening.

            Instead of sending bombers over the target in massive formations during daylight hours as we Americans did,  the British always flew singly and at night.  They took their planes over the target, one at a time, every few minutes for long periods.  One day I asked an RAF sergeant how they expected to put their bombs on the target in the dark. 

            “We may not hit anything,” he admitted.  “But we damn well keep the bastards awake all night.”

            Based at Cerignola, another airfield near Foggia, were several groups of American B-24 Liberators.  Like our B-17’s, these were four-engined heavy bombers.  They flew the same missions we did, and their planes, like ours, were manned largely by boy warriors sent into battle shortly after learning how to use a safety razor.  

            While I didn’t know him in those days, one young hot-shot B-24 pilot at Cerignola was destined to play a large role in my life.  When we met twenty years later in Washington, George G.Troutman, by then a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, was working on Capitol Hill for General Dynamics, then the largest employer in Jim Wright’s district.  George and I developed a solid friendship that will surely endure--at least until I tell this story about what happened to him at Cerignola.

            At 19, George was a second lieutenant who had proved so skillful at the controls of a ponderous B-24 that he was designated, after flying only a handful of combat missions, as one of the group’s lead pilots.

            In this capacity he was required, between regular combat missions, to log far more training hours than other pilots.  One day he was assigned to go aloft and put several hours of “slow time” on a new engine just installed in one of the group’s lead aircraft.  For easy identification in the air, all lead planes had the same distinctive paint jobs.

            With seven members of his regular crew, George tooled around the sky for several hours, relaxing and making small talk, as he broke in the new engine.  Then, on the way back to the base, six of his crewmen asked if they could watch the landing from the flight deck, right behind the pilot. 

            “Sure--why not?” George answered off-handedly. 

             As he prepared to land, there were several things George didn’t know.  He was unaware, first of all, that in a command car, waiting anxiously beside the landing strip, was the group commander, a full colonel.  He was worried because his very good friend, the deputy commander, had led the combat mission that day, and radioed back that his plane had sustained severe battle damage to its left landing gear.  His plane, a lead aircraft like the one George was flying, had been given first priority to land.

            There was one other thing George didn’t know.  When he good-naturedly allowed his six crewmen to gather on the fight deck, he drastically changed the center of gravity in his plane, making it perilously nose-heavy.

            As the landing field loomed ahead, George made a textbook final approach.  Then, as he neared the runway, he tried to pull up the nose and level out. The nose wouldn’t come up.  

            The big bomber hit the runway like a falling anvil.  The left tire exploded.  George fought for control as the plane careened off the runway.  Sirens whined.  Crash trucks and ambulances roared up.  Photographers appeared.  The group commander lurched up in his command car.  Seeing the plane damaged but largely intact, he waved happily in George’s direction. 

            “Great landing, Colonel!” he shouted from his command car.

            Great landing?  Colonel?  Bewildered, George hissed an order to his crew:  “You guys say nothing--understand?”

            As the commander strode closer to the plane, he stopped abruptly.  “You’re not Charlie,” he said.  “Where’s Charlie?”

            Puzzled, George said, “I don’t know, sir.”

            “Wasn’t Charlie Thompson, my deputy commander, supposed to be flying this plane?”

            “ I don’t think so, sir.”

            “Well, who the hell are you?”

            “I’m Lieutenant Troutman, sir.”    

            “Are you the ones with the battle damage to the landing gear?”

            “No, sir,” George replied.  “I didn’t fly the mission.”

            “But this one of our lead planes,” cried the colonel.

            “I’ve had it up slow-timing it, sir.  It just got a new engine.”

            “But Charlie was supposed to have damage to his left gear.  Isn’t that what happened to you?”

            “No, sir.  I just blew a tire on landing.”

            “On landing?  Well, where’s Charlie, then?“

            “I don’t know, sir.  Maybe he hasn’t returned yet.”

            The colonel looked around, nonplussed.  This young man, heaven knows how,  had almost wrecked one of his lead airplanes.  Yet the commander painfully remembered that he had enthusiastically congratulated him on a great landing.  And everybody knows group commanders don’t make mistakes.

            Climbing back into his command car, the commander shook his head.  “Well son,” he said,  “you really...er, uh--you really know how to handle a blowout,” he said.

            For his first taste of combat, each new air crewmen arriving in Foggia was singled out to fly a mission with an experienced crew.  The target on my first trip was the railroad marshaling yard in Verona in northern Italy.  This was a critical point on the Brenner Pass through the Alps, over which German supplies came in from Austria.  We caught a little flak, but no fighters.  Or at least none that I saw, if you know what I mean.

            For flight crews, it was a nightly ritual to grab a flashlight and walk down to check the squadron bulletin board.  Posted there, usually by 9 o’clock, was the next day’s Battle Order.   For the first few times, it was a sobering experience to find yourself and your crew listed, matter of factly, on something labeled, Battle Order, 342nd Bomb Squadron, 97th Bomb Group. While you always knew, deep down, that this time would come, it still took a moment to realize they were really talking about you.  Then, in sort of a forced bravado, you might turn to a buddy and try to make a joke about it:  “Willie, please inform the Colonel that I’m sorry, but I don’t do battles.”

             Back in the States I guess a few of us tried to delude ourselves into thinking that something--we had no idea what--would suddenly pop up to keep us from being exposed to honest-to-goodness bullets.  Yet, on a black, cold and lonely night in a strange land, there it was.  These guys were serious.  You go back to the tent, worry for a few minutes, then crawl onto your canvas cot and, surprisingly, sleep pretty well.  Until that SOB from squadron headquarters barges into our tent before dawn, blowing a police whistle.

            It was a chore just to get suited up for a six- or seven-hour high altitude mission, considering all the clothes and gadgets you needed to put on.  You started out, of course,  with your highly-fashionable olive drab long underwear, followed by wool shirt and pants.  Over these you pulled on an electrically-heated flying suit whose shoes, trousers, coat and gloves all plugged into each other.  Then, over your electric suit,  you climbed into insulated trousers and jacket.  The extension cord for your electric suit hung out, embarrassingly enough, from your fly.  I had some misgivings about plugging it in for the first time.

            Next came your heavy flying boots, followed by your inflatable Mae West life preserver, parachute harness and throat microphone.  Then, after takeoff, you slipped on thin nylon gloves to keep your hands from sticking to any freezing metal you had to touch without your heated gloves.  Later, when you reached 10,000 feet, you put on your leather flying helmet with built-in earphones which had a cord to  plug into the intercom terminal near your machine gun.  After that you donned your oxygen mask and connected its hose to the ship’s supply system.  Then you made sure the electric wire was hooked up to keep your oxygen mask from freezing. At this point you were strung with enough wires to look like a utility pole.  

            Later, on the bomb run, it was advisable to put on your steel helmet and a flak vest weighing maybe 30 pounds.  Also, of course, you needed to keep handy your chest-pack parachute designed to be snapped on to your harness.  You then needed to make sure your regular GI shoes were tied securely to your parachute harness.  This was necessary because your boots usually popped off when your parachute opened and it would be difficult to walk out of Germany barefooted.  At this point you usually checked to make sure you remembered your shoulder holster and 45-caliber pistol, as well as your waterproof escape kit.  This contained maps and a bundle of American currency which, believe it or not, escaping flyers said Germans preferred to their own money.  

            When our crew began flying together, I secretly wished I had not thrown away the eyeglasses that helped me see the screen back at the Rio Theatre in Kingsville, Texas.  Sure enough, before long the interphone in our plane was crackling with urgent advisories from other gunners.  As we tooled at 25,000 feet over Germany, our tail gunner, Willie Pigg, would say, “Hey, Tex--watch that fighter out there at 3 o’clock.”

            If the fighter was reasonably close, I could usually see it.  But even if I couldn’t, I decided this would be an inappropriate time to say so.  “Roger, Willie--I’ve got my eye on him,”  I would respond. 

            This was not quite as stupid as it may sound.  For one thing, any fighter we saw was almost always ours.  On virtually every mission we were protected by our “little friends.” Often these were long-range P-51’s with distinctive checkered tails, flown by African-American pilots now famous as the Tuskegee Airmen.  Once our plane lost an engine half an hour before we reached Linz, Austria.  The formation left us behind and we went over the target all by ourselves.  I hadn’t realized it before, but when yours  is the only plane in the sky, it’s hard to pretend the flak gunners are shooting at somebody else.  Departing from the target, we were exactly the type of lone, crippled straggler that would delight any Luftwaffe fighters in the neighborhood.  By radio we asked for help, and two checkered-tail P-51’s came back to keep an eye on us.  Crisscrossing each other in the sky 5,000 feet above us like protective angels, they etched beautiful and comforting con trails as they escorted us home. 

            To the courageous bomber crews and fighter pilots who flew the really tough missions before we arrived overseas in late 1944, we owe our gratitude--and quite possibly, our lives.  Thanks to their sacrifices in knocking out key industrial and petroleum targets like Schweinfurt and Ploesti, the Luftwaffe was practically out of business during our watch.  Nearly all the Me-109’s and FW-190’s we saw were five miles below us, grounded for lack of fuel, parts or pilots--or maybe all three.  What the German still did have, however, was a limited number of Me-262’s.

            These were the first operational jet fighters in the world, capable of sweeping through our bomber formations at nearly 600 miles an hour while we plodded along in our B-17’s at 165.  The Luftwaffe send up a force of Me-262’s to meet us over Berlin on March 24, 1945, and shot down two B-17s in another formation.  While on my eighteen missions our plane never came under direct fighter attack, but the Germans proved to us they still had plenty of flak.

            Vienna alone was reported to have five hundred anti-aircraft guns, and to me personally that estimate seemed a bit low.  It was because of these ferocious German flak barrages that gunners like myself were given an additional responsibility.  It was our job to throw out, of all things, tiny strips of tinfoil.  Folded into packages about eighteen inches long, these strips were designed to confuse German gunners by registering on their radar scopes as dozens of other B-17’s.  Thus their radar operator could not be sure which blips on his screen were real planes and which were the tinfoil strips, or chaff, that we were happily scattering over the sky.

            On the bomb run, where flak was usually heaviest, I threw out this stuff through a small opening on the floor near my gun position.  My orders were to dump two bundles every thirty seconds, but the thicker the flak, the faster I worked.  Probably it really did confuse German radar, but even if not I felt better having something to do when those big, nasty explosions were blackening the sky.  And besides, once on a mission to Vienna, some unpleasant fellow on the ground shot out my waist window the moment after I had ducked down to throw out chaff.  My gun position got a little drafty on the way home.

            Today Shoo Shoo Baby is on permanent display at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.  On that day in 1988 when she made her ceremonial flight around Dover, a small chase plane eased alongside to let an Air Force photographer shoot new pictures of the old but distinguished lady.  It was as if a movie queen of yesteryear  were being allowed to preen herself before an audience of new admirers. 

            Once again on that flight I stood peering out the right waist window--a spot where, nearsighted or not,  I had been privileged to see man at his worst, and at his best.  For this same privilege, thousands of other fellows had paid a far higher price. 

            Uprooted at 18 or 19 and sent to war and killed, many of them never had a chance to make love to a woman or to build a career or to buy a house or to wipe a grandkid’s nose or to grow old and die in bed.  I think about my schoolmate Ishmael Valverde, who died at Ploesti long before I first saw my name on a Battle Order, and my cousin, Weldon Lacy, a B-29 gunner killed on one of the first raids on Japan.  I think about the crew in the next tent, whose co-pilot was decapitated by a shell fragment over Vienna.  I think about my barracks buddies Ted Gilson and Mort Carlis and Clyde Plants who were killed with their whole crew at Blechhammer on their very first mission.  It’s strange for a guy 72 years old to feel a close kinship, even now,  with kids who died as kids, yet somehow I do. 

            Today we’ve got an entirely different world, and I hope we’ve got a little more sense, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  We’ve already had so many wars that children have trouble remembering which is which.  When our first grandson, Michael Williams, was about six years old, one day he happened to discover the old trunk in my room.

            “What’s in the trunk, Papa?” he asked.

            “Just a bunch of old stuff from the war.”

            “Were you in the war?”

            “Yes, I was.”

            “Who did you fight for--the Blue or the Gray?”