Questions kept gnawing at me: how best to do this, how to survive, how to get it done? I even asked myself if I was scared. I had never been scared before. Well, not scared before doing something, but maybe a little afterward, when realizing how close I had come to “buying the farm.” This was different, not like the time B.E. and I attacked some forty-odd Messerschmitts by ourselves. We just piled into them. No time to think, no time to weigh the odds or consider consequences. Just react, attack, fight, and think about it later. I finally decided I wasn’t scared, just apprehensive and getting madder every moment. Whatever nameless lame-brain in some damned headquarters had dreamed up this idiot plan ought to be here, not me.
No more thinking about it. Time to DO it. OK, ease the nose down. Add some RPM and throttle. Get out front and down on the deck well short of the target. Have a quick glance at a well-memorized map for those vital checkpoints. All there: the bend in the river, the small town just beyond, that autobahn running parallel off to the right, Stuttgart ahead. I’m lined up almost perfectly. A small correction to the left, the target coming up, camera power ON, get down lower, quick glances at those red alignment markings to check the needed angle of bank, a few tracers and smoke trails of flak arcing over my canopy, then camera switch ON and … WHOOSH over the rail yard and on past. Surprisingly little flak. Must have caught them by surprise. So far, so good. Camera switch OFF and a hard left out to my holding point to time the DURING pass.
I watched the bomber stream approaching. That part was easy. The sky at their altitude was black with flak. A couple of B-17s were trailing smoke and falling from the formation. Poor bastards. I headed back west, still on the deck, and turned under the lead box to parallel their course back toward the target. My run had been timed so I’d arrive at the target just as the bombs were to hit, and I was in good position for the drop. The smoke bombs coming off the lead bomber stood out clearly, and I knew everyone else in the lead formation was releasing his bombs at almost the same instant. Now was the time to concentrate on my own run-in to the right of the target. Lineup was good. I was about a half mile off to the right of the marshaling yard. Ought to be close enough for good pictures but far enough away not to get mixed up with the explosions.
Things were getting tense. This time the flak gunners were really pissed; the sky was full of tracers and black bursts. It seemed forever for those bombs to fall, and I was practically on top of the rail yard with the camera running. Nothing had happened yet. Come on, bombs! Make this good. Come on! Opposite the target, no bombs, then, suddenly, WHAMMO, WHAMMO! The first bombs hit. They hit all right, just off my right wing! Ear-shattering, bone-crunching blasts, jarring my insides like a hammer, shock waves roiling the air, visible waves fast as thunder across the earth, tumbling my P-51 sidewise for an instant. Mind-crunching blasts of successive shock, noise like a thousand pile drivers hitting at once … WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM! And ALL of it happening off on my right side! My right side, for God’s sake, not on the marshaling yard to the left, not where I was taking all those lovely pictures! The big boys had missed the damned target by a little over three-quarters of a mile, and I was almost in the middle of the bomb pattern, right next to the impact point.
Discretion got the better part of valor and I hightailed it out of there back toward England. No one had ever cleared a target area faster, lower, or angrier.
Halfway home I got over my anger and started laughing. Hell, I was alive! Shaken up, yes, but perking right along with a healthy bird and plenty of gas. I even shot up a train on the way out, so the mission wasn’t a total bust. The rest of the trip home was abnormally peaceful.
I buzzed across the Channel under a clear but cold blue sky. There was the black-and-white lighthouse standing on Orford Ness, as always, a welcome checkpoint and comforting sight. Then on up the river, a course of 265 from the fork, and give Heater a call, “Cleared for initial runway 27?” I made a low, fast break in a tight pattern, engine in idle all the way, exhaust popping and complaining, but letting it be known I wasn’t adding power to make a correction, then rolled out just above the runway for a good three-pointer, and taxied around the west side to my parking spot, where Sergeant Wold and his crew waited.
I grinned under my oxygen mask when I saw Horton and Thomas waiting with Glen. To my knowledge, they seldom ventured out onto the perimeter track. Usually they were all geared up to ask their silly damned questions at the debriefing: where, when, what direction, what time, how many, etc., etc., but today, here they were, looking self-consciously nonchalant in their garrison wheel hats and shirt-and-tie uniforms.
I deliberately taxied into the hardstand the wrong way. Glen saw what was happening and moved away from the two intelligence officers. He flagged me in with a commendable flourish and grinned broadly as I swung my tail around with a blast of throttle, sending those wheel hats off their heads across the grass and blowing a couple of neckties straight out in the prop wash. It wasn’t a nice thing to do to two good friends, now trying to keep their balance, but look what the hell they had done to me!
I took my time shutting down, unstrapping, filling out the forms, then taking an unnecessary leak behind the tail of my bird, and savoring the walk toward Don and Tommy with all the innocence I could muster as I buttoned my fly. Don was already headed toward me.
“What’s up, Don?” I asked. “What’re you two guys doing out here on the flight line? Something special?” Don didn’t glare, but his look as a captain very much senior to me was certainly expressive. I could see Tommy suppressing a smile, so I knew I was in the driver’s seat.
Don barked, “What about the pictures? Did you get them? Did the camera work? Are there—”
“Whoa!” I interrupted. “Let’s go on into your office and I’ll give you the whole report.”
God, I felt smug. It was my turn, and it was going to please me to pull Don’s leg just as far as I possibly could. He started to protest, but I was already climbing aboard the waiting jeep with my flight gear. I saw an unfamiliar sergeant removing what had to be the film from that special camera in my bird, and I tried not to laugh out loud thinking about what I was going to report for the benefit of all those staff people up the line.
We drove around the perimeter track as the rest of the group returned to base. Aircraft hit the traffic pattern in twos and fours and I was a little happy to see no victory rolls. That meant I hadn’t missed anything interesting.
We entered Don’s sanctum and I took a chair opposite his desk. Don was almost twittering with impatience. “Well, damn it, did you get the pictures or not?”
“I don’t know, Don.”
“What the hell do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean I turned on the switches just like I was supposed to. The BEFORE pass was a snap and the DURING pass sure got my attention, but I can’t know if that damned camera worked. That’s your concern, and I guess you won’t know till someone processes the film. Oh, incidentally, I made only the first two passes, the BEFORE and the DURING. I skipped the AFTER.”
“Damn it!” he yelped. “They particularly wanted those AFTER pictures! Why didn’t you get them? Why? My God, 8th will be furious!”
“Well, Don, you can tell the people at 8th Air Force headquarters that the BEFORE pictures are all they really need to look at. The DURING and AFTER are exactly the same as the BEFORE. And while you are at it, please tell someone down there at Wycombe Abbey to kiss my ass!”
October 30 brought terrible disaster. Good weather over England, also forecast for Europe, turned deadly when the group encountered an immense front over Hamburg. Colonel Zemke, Lieutenant Colonel Herren, and Lieutenant Holmes all went down in the turbulence. They were last seen in the clouds in various stages of uncontrolled spins. One guy witnessed Zemke’s wing being torn off. No one had news of any safe landings or parachutes. The pilots who made it home reported pulling 9 g’s in recovery, and several of the planes were heavily damaged from the strain. All of us were stunned to know we had lost ou
r group and squadron commanders in one day. Major Jeffrey quickly took over and tried to cheer us up, but we were devastated. We had to go on. There were still missions ahead. You can’t survive as a fighter pilot if you dwell on your sorrow much past the first beer.
On November 2, I damaged an Me-109 on the ground, but Major Jeffrey didn’t waste any time congratulating me in debriefing. He had other things on his mind when he hauled me into his office and announced, “Robin, you’ve just about flown out your tour here at Wattisham. Where do you want to go?”
“What? That can’t be! Hell, Jeff, I haven’t flown that much! I don’t want to go home. How do those guys over at Debden and Steeple Morden and Boxted get to stay here for so long?”
Damn! What a fix this was! I hadn’t even thought about finishing my sixty-five missions or 270 hours, whatever a tour was. I just assumed I could go on for as long as I wanted to, or perhaps more to the point, as long as they would have me. This was a hell of a piece of news. Here it was, November 1944, and though the war had really swung our way after the invasion, the Germans were a long way from throwing in the towel. How were the Allies going to whip the Third Reich without me?! Well, maybe they could manage—they had done all right before my arrival—but I still didn’t want to miss the action. This was where I belonged and I knew it. I was absolutely certain.
The major smiled and told me I had a choice. I could sign on for twenty-five more missions, or go home on R&R for two months and then come back for another full tour. Something about that didn’t feel right. Some of the guys in other groups had been over here for a couple of years, even more in some cases. Take Hub Zemke, our great group commander. He’d been over here with USAAFE since day one. Yes, he’d gone down in weather, but we happily learned he had survived and was a POW, so what the hell? Someone wasn’t being fully honest with me, or perhaps no one in our outfit knew the ropes like the old-timers.
Colonel Riddle had reassumed group command, and I cornered him in the mess that evening with my problem. He repeated exactly what Jeffrey had told me, so I knew my situation had been discussed. It didn’t take long to realize my best course of action was going home. But what home? I didn’t have a home. Virginia was out because my dad was gone, stepmother Nina was out in Beverly Hills, and my dear aunt Kitty and uncle Phil were nearby in Van Nuys. California was too far to go. Brother Stevan was still at West Point and I knew I had to see him. He’d bust loose from the Point before Christmas and we could go down to D.C. together. OK, I didn’t have a home, but at least I had a plan.
I also knew I’d be MIA as far as the squadron was concerned, and that didn’t feel good. Over the previous seven months a deep-rooted camaraderie had developed among the surviving pilots. It wasn’t something we talked about, or even consciously considered, but it was real enough. When someone went down, his absence was quickly dismissed after the first beer was raised to him that evening. He wasn’t talked about other than a shake of the head and a sincere shrug of “Too bad.” This reaction wasn’t callous or emotionally self-protective. We had drawn into ourselves, both individually and as a group. Our daily existence was a shared mutuality of survival. Bad things happened, but not to you and not to those still around you. If someone was shot down, obviously he really didn’t belong to the group anymore. Thoughts of him had no more relevance or meaning in our daily lives. His bad luck wasn’t going to rub off on us.
Those thoughts extended also to pilots who had successfully finished a tour and were about to return to the land of the “Big PX.” That individual no longer belonged. You felt it, and he knew it. So if you were one of the lucky ones and had those going-home orders in your pocket, the only thing to do was swallow any sentimental feelings and get the hell out of there as quickly and quietly as possible.
I flew the last eight missions of my first tour by the ninth of November, and did so without enthusiasm. The final mission was a milk run over Metz and my return to Wattisham completed 270 hours of combat time, but I landed with a heavy heart. Sure, I was coming back to the action in January, but somehow that didn’t count for much. When I finished my last flight, I became a virtual outcast among my closest friends in the group and still had a week before leaving. It was like being invisible. The psychological impact was a real shocker. Sergeant Wold tried to express his good-byes and best wishes, but as much as I appreciated his thoughts, they didn’t alleviate my sense of not belonging anymore. Oh well, time to swallow the blues and go home.
9
R&R, Second Tour, and Home
In short order I was on a C-54 headed for New York. The feeling of detachment persisted. The plane was full of returning crew members but we scarcely talked to one another. We were wrapped in our own memories. We seemed to be in a state of decompression. Each of us, whether he knew it or not, was significantly different from the guy who had started flying combat those long months ago.
After processing at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, I headed up the Hudson to see Stevan at the Point. West Point was still West Point. Nothing had changed. On the one hand, that was comforting; on the other, I looked at the plebes and wondered how running around with your chin tucked into your collar had ever been considered either character building or military training. Let it be. The strangest thing was the overwhelming sensation that I didn’t belong here. The place was dull, dripping-gray dull, and it wasn’t just upstate New York in mid-November. There wasn’t that electricity in the air that I felt in Britain. The academy exuded an isolated atmosphere, as if nothing mattered beyond those Gothic walls. Not even the war existed. The cadets themselves seemed juvenile, though some of them were older than my twenty-two years. I checked in at the Thayer Hotel and tried talking to some of the officers at the bar. It was a wasted effort. We had nothing in common. I wasn’t interested in them, and they certainly didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. The whole experience was upsetting. I didn’t like being an outsider, feeling like a leper. I guess the one positive aspect of the experience was the realization that I was the one who had changed, not the Point. I had to ask myself what I expected of these others, and I came to realize the width of the gulf that existed between those who had been there and those who hadn’t.
It was great to see Stevan. We spent as much time together as we could for two days, but I really disliked hanging around the Point during Stevan’s classes, so I went up to Stewart Field to put in some flight time and found a haven there. Even if the people there weren’t on the same frequency, at least they flew airplanes and I didn’t feel so detached. Conveniently there were a few P-51s and P-47s on the ramp. Odd, but no one was too interested in flying them. I was! I had a ball.
I had an encounter at Stewart. I went into base operations after flying for a couple of hours to thank Lieutenant Colonel Benny Webster for the use of one of his birds. Colonel Webster had been a tactical officer during flight training before we graduated and was considered by the cadets to be a truly fine gentleman and officer. I enjoyed seeing him again. My visit was interrupted when I saw an all-too-familiar figure standing at the operations desk. It was Military Bill, my flight instructor from Stewart in the fall of ’42, the man who had lined us up for inspection, the guy who had told me I was too big to fly fighters, and the guy who would personally assign me to bombers, IF I even graduated. So now, here we were, two years down the road.
I walked over and said casually, “Hi, Bill.”
I watched his face as recognition dawned. He looked at me, checked my captain’s bars, and tried hard not to notice the Silver Star, DFC, and Air Medals I wore. I was glad he noticed. The moment offered an opportunity for a bit of payback after the harassment all his students had endured.
“The name is Olds, Bill. Remember me?” The first-name business was an intentional reminder that we were no longer cadet and captain.
“Of course, Olds. Nice to see you again. What are you doing here?” he replied in a deliberately bored tone.
“Oh, just getting some flying time while on R&R. Say, I’ll be going back
to my outfit in England pretty soon. It’s a fine unit: P-51s, great record, lots of action, but we’ve taken some bad hits these past weeks and are kinda short on pilots. We sure could use some guys with real flying experience. How about coming on over and giving us a hand? I’m slated to become squadron ops when I get back and I’m sure I could arrange it.” (Squadron ops was true. The rest? Pure BS.)
“Well, Olds, that’s a nice offer, but I figure what I’m doing here is far more important than anything I might contribute over there.”
He was satisfied with his safe little slot there in the training business and had reached a point where he didn’t even recognize how smug he was about it. I’m not proud of it, but his attitude revolted me. I couldn’t possibly know it at the time, but he represented a whole class of air force pilots who were on one side of the fence, and to him, those of us who had been shot at were on the other side. I don’t mean to imply that the differentiation was always of a man’s own choosing, because many great guys tried and couldn’t get to combat. Whether a man did or didn’t want to go to combat wasn’t the point. What mattered was whether he tried and couldn’t, or avoided going and succeeded. Huge difference. It might be wrong to accuse Military Bill of combat reluctance. But I do.
Fighter Pilot Page 15
