Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  Though he felt that his perseverance—all those visits to Dr. Peppard’s Manhattan ophthalmology center; all those days and nights training his eye muscles—had finally paid off, his ecstasy turned to anger when he learned that he would not be allowed to carry the seniority for the time he had accrued since his enlistment in the Infantry Reserves. In fact, in order to resign from the infantry and reenlist in the Army Air Corps, he would lose his two years of time “in grade” as a second lieutenant. But his desire to fly overcame any doubts, and within days Jay reported to the Army’s Primary Flying School in Glenview, Illinois, for three months of initial training. Glenview was a weeding-out process, with Jay and the other flying cadets spending dawn to dusk either at calisthenics or at “ground school”—classroom lessons in the various skills needed to fly an aircraft. If you showed an aptitude for these requirements you moved on to pilot training. If not, you were returned to a general army assignment.

  Despite his Piper Cub experience, Jay was far from the best potential pilot at Glenview. But the leadership skills he had forged in the Boy Scouts caught the attention of his superiors, who appointed him captain of cadets. At the conclusion of the 12-week course only 15 of the 47 candidates who had reported to the Primary Flying School that summer were deemed Airmen material, Jay among them. From Illinois he was sent to Alabama’s Maxwell Field for another six months of training at the Army’s Advanced Flight School, where he finally was allowed to step into a military aircraft.

  His mornings at Maxwell were stacked with classes in communications, technical supply, radar operations, weather forecasting, armament identification, and radio operation. He proved a natural at distinguishing the silhouettes of German and Japanese aircraft from British and U.S. planes as they flashed in rapid succession across a projector screen. And while the other students complained during Morse Code classes that trying to decipher the clicks and clacks was like listening to Rice Krispies being poured into a bowl, Jay enjoyed showing off the dit-dah proficiency he had honed in the Scouts. Each cadet was also expected to be fluent in close order drill and the handling of small arms, from pistols to rifles to riot guns. Again, Jay’s experience with the Culver Rifles put him on a par even with pilots from rural backgrounds who had been raised to hunt for their dinners.

  Afternoons at Maxwell were reserved for actual flights with an instructor, usually in a two-seat trainer. It was here that Jay was introduced to aviation maneuvers—loops and chandelles, spins and touch-and-gos—that he had only read about. He spent hours practicing takeoffs and landings, go-arounds, instrument flying, cross-country navigation, and night-formation flying. He’d often exit the cockpit dripping sweat, his flight suit soaked to its logbook pockets.

  When the trainees were finally allowed to solo, the instructors at Maxwell expected them to abide by several hard-and-fast rules. One maxim involved takeoffs: the student pilots were taught to take a hard right turn as soon as they gained altitude. On one of his first solo flights Jay was so excited that he forgot his “starboard procedure,” and as punishment he was forced to wear his parachute strapped tight around his chest and legs that night at chow. He never forgot again.

  But aside from that rare miscue, Jay was a model cadet behind the yoke of both single-engine and twin-engine trainers, and in March 1941 he graduated from Maxwell and received his coveted wings. He was again commissioned a second lieutenant, this time in the United States Army Air Corps.

  3

  JAY & JOE

  TO THE ADVENTUROUS YOUNG FLIERS of Jay’s generation, nothing was more captivating than the martial images of World War I’s dashing “Knights of the Sky.” Jay was enthralled by the romance of these early fighter pilots, particularly the several Americans who had dominated wartime headlines while succeeding one another to claim the coveted title “Ace of Aces.” Two decades later their names still resonated—Raoul Lufbery, Frank Luke, Frank Bayliss, David Putnam. But Jay identified most closely with the greatest of them all, Eddie Rickenbacker. It was the tales of Rickenbacker’s derring-do that he had pored over as boy, and it was not hard to recognize the similarities between the two Airmen.

  Like Jay, Rickenbacker was an automobile buff. In his youth he had competed in the first Indianapolis 500 and set land speed records at the Daytona Raceway. Rickenbacker enlisted when America entered the Great War and, given his background, he was assigned a position as a driver on the staff of Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. But Rickenbacker chafed at his role as a glorified chauffeur and within months he fast-talked his way into the recently established U.S. Army Air Service as a pilot in training. Much as Jay would not allow his rejection from the Navy’s flight program to stand in his way of becoming a flier, nothing could stop Rickenbacker from climbing into a cockpit.

  Once aloft, Rickenbacker took his cue from his mentor, the Franco-American ace Lufbery, and honed his reputation as a lone-wolf fighter pilot. It was a habit that served him well as he patrolled the skies deep inside Germany by himself. And though aerial tactics and fighter-plane design had naturally advanced by leaps in the decades between the two world wars, Jay never forgot the solitary aspect of the Rickenbacker legend, and imagined himself following the same flight patterns over the same French and German terrain.

  The comparisons between the two men, however, went only so far. Rickenbacker had been born into poverty, and after his father died in a construction accident he was forced to drop out of elementary school and work at two jobs in order to help support his mother and six brothers and sisters. Jay had been fortunate enough to attend a prestigious university while Rickenbacker had settled for a mail-order diploma from the International Correspondence School based in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But like Jay, at heart Rickenbacker was a consummate if amateur engineer who lived by the code “A machine has to have a purpose.”

  There was one other major difference between Jay and Rickenbacker. Though Jay carried a relatively scant 155 pounds on his six-foot frame, the configuration of the instrument panels common to the Army’s attack and pursuit aircraft in the early 1940s led the service to prefer shorter men in the cockpits of its fighter planes. So Jay was rejected yet again, this time by the Air Corps’ fighter branch, and instead assigned to bombers. This time he could not concoct any clever arguments to reverse the Army’s decision, and with his ambitions of honing his dogfighting skills in preparation for duels against Germany’s new Red Barons dashed, he was assigned to the 43rd Bomb Group based at Langley Field near Newport News, Virginia.

  The 43rd had recently been carved from the Army Air Corps’ venerable 2nd Bomb Group, and it consisted of four squadrons readying to fly the new B-17 Flying Fortresses. The bombers were only just trickling off the Boeing Airplane Company’s assembly lines, and initially Jay and his fellow rookies had to content themselves with flight simulation drills and hours upon hours of classwork. This did not mean Jay could not admire the Flying Fortress from afar, and a few days after his arrival at Langley he attended an aerial exhibition put on by the 43rd for what Airmen called the “brass hats” from Washington. The politicians who attended these mock combat demonstrations controlled the purse strings for the nascent USAAF, and in order to leave the best impression, the Group’s commanding officers chose only the unit’s most accomplished Airmen to take part.

  That day Jay watched in amazement as the bombardier in the lead B-17 planted several 500-pound dummy bombs within 75 feet of his target at altitudes ranging from 5,000 to 8,000 feet. Afterward, Jay sought out the Airman whose uncanny accuracy had piqued his curiosity. Most bombardiers were not hard to find. A B-17 bombsight’s eyepiece was rimmed with a black rubber ring, and as the bombardier sighted his targets the rubber would mix with sweat and rub off, inevitably giving the “rock dropper” what looked like a permanent shiner. That night Jay combed the barracks and mess halls at Langley, stopping to chat with any man who looked as if he had just been in a bar fight. Though he never did find his man, he did lea
rn his name—Joseph Sarnoski. Sarnoski, he was told, was considered the most skilled bombardier on the base, if not in the entire U.S. Army Air Force.

  The next morning Jay reported to his first Bombing and Gunnery class. He nearly fell out of his chair when the lithe, open-faced instructor with the faint black outline rimming his left eye introduced himself as Staff Sgt. Joe Sarnoski. After class Jay offered to buy him a beer. He needed to know, he said, how Sarnoski got those bombs so close.

  Joe wasn’t certain what to make of this. He was well aware that every bomber pilot in the service was expected to be able to perform the duties of each member of his crew, whether navigating, flight engineering, or even tail gunning. So it was not completely unheard of for an officer to pick the brains of enlisted Airmen. Still, it wasn’t often that a lieutenant approached a sergeant, a complete stranger at that, and offered to stand him a drink. Joe went along, and as the weeks passed and Jay picked Joe’s brain about the B-17’s idiosyncrasies, the two became fast friends. Joe was only too happy to share his expertise. Joe, who hailed from the hard regions of Pennsylvania coal country, was not only flattered by the attention, but a bit in awe of the college man so eager to befriend him. Conversely, it did not take long for Jay to discover that Joe was one of those special men who wear their grace lightly. As he would one day write to Joe’s sister Victoria, “In the end, Joe took me under his wing.”

  Given Jay’s personality and Joe’s sly sense of humor, it is very likely that Jay intended the pun.

  THREE YEARS JAY’S SENIOR, JOE Sarnoski was the fifth of 16 children born to Polish immigrants who had settled in the coal-rich Carbondale area of northeastern Pennsylvania around the turn of the century. His father Johann—later Americanized to “John”—had found work in the mines there, but when his health began to fail in the late 1920s he and his wife Josephine used the little money he’d saved to purchase a ramshackle farmhouse with no indoor plumbing on a small plot of land on the outskirts of town.

  His timing could not have been worse. He had barely signed the deed when the Great Depression hit. For the next decade the lean economic times would lie over the Sarnoski farmstead like an illness.

  Though Jay and Joe were both Pennsylvanians by birth, the 130 miles that separated Carbondale from Carlisle might as well have been an ocean. Whereas Jay had grown up in the semi-luxury of an upper-middle-class household, Joe and his family had never known anything but hard manual labor. For reasons that baffled even his children, John Sarnoski refused to refer to his two-and-a-half-acre spread as a farm—“our land” was how he always referred to it. Nonetheless the Sarnoski boys and girls were a regular sight by the side of the road selling the tomatoes, beets, beans, and cucumbers their mother cultivated in her small vegetable garden, and the brood also hawked wild blueberries and mulberries they collected from the nearby woods.

  As the years passed the Sarnoski children arrived almost annually, with the aid of a midwife; none was born in a hospital. When they were old enough their parents assigned them all specific jobs, whether canning vegetables, tending chickens, washing diapers, putting up jam, or feeding the lone milk cow. Josephine, whose halting English masked her proficiency in four other languages, also taught her daughters how to sew most of the family’s clothes.

  Like so many emigrants to America, John and Josephine revered the educational opportunities their adopted country offered. But with money tight and the older children needed at home, it was not until Joe’s graduation that any of the Sarnoskis earned a high school degree. This accomplishment reflected Joe’s personal work ethic as much as his eclectic sense of wonder.

  Between school and assisting his older brother Walter with dawn-to-dusk chores—which included near-daily hunting and fishing forays to put food on the table—Joe managed to explore an astonishing range of interests. Though he was slight of stature, his natural athleticism took form in his deftness not only as a skier and ice skater, but also on his high school baseball team, where he was a star infielder. He also taught himself to play a passable accordion and was a gifted and extroverted crooner who would burst into song in either English or Polish at the hint of an audience. When word of his talent spread through Carbondale’s large Polish community, he found himself picking up extra cash on weekends singing and playing at weddings and anniversary parties. He also took a part-time job as a chauffeur for a neighbor who owned a car but did not know how to drive. Most of the money Joe earned he turned over to his parents, who allowed him to keep a few dollars for himself. This extra cash was usually deposited into his “Buy a Motorcycle Fund”—a rusty tin box he stored under his bed.

  Meanwhile, Joe’s schoolteachers were astonished that this son of a dirt farmer had such a wide range of interests, which included not only music but classical poetry. This may have stemmed from Joe’s deep spirituality. His family and friends noted that he rarely went anywhere without his hand-carved wooden rosary beads stuffed deep into his pocket. Joe was what his sister Matilda called “fussy” over his younger siblings, particularly the girls, slyly imparting life lessons in the form of stories and yarns.

  “When he tried to teach us things, we listened,” says Matilda, ten years Joe’s junior. “He wanted us to grow up to be good people, and as young as I was, he could tell I wanted to be educated like him.” To that end, Joe promised Matilda that if she studied hard enough to become the valedictorian of her high school class, he would buy her a wristwatch.

  Finally and perhaps most important—and much like the young Jay—early in his youth Joe developed a passion for airplanes. He plastered the walls of what the Sarnoskis called their farmhouse’s “Great Room,” where he bunked with his six brothers, with photos and drawings of all manner of aircraft torn from newspapers and magazines, and his bed was strewn with facsimiles of gliders, fighter planes, and bombers he had carved from softwood or fashioned out of metal detritus such as shotgun shells. Despite his longing to save all his cash for a motorcycle, there were times when he could not resist the allure of a new model airplane kit he’d spotted in a downtown store window, and he would dig into his wedding-singer cache and splurge. He would then disappear for hours—or as long as his chores would allow—to assemble his new toy.

  Though Joe’s strong hands helped make the farm run, John and Josephine recognized that they could not hold their son back forever. In March 1936, two months after Joe’s twenty-first birthday, they presented him with a bus ticket to Baltimore. He tried to argue, but his parents convinced him that his younger brothers were now strong enough to assume his workload. When Joe exited the bus depot in downtown Baltimore the next day, he walked straight to a nearby army recruiting station and enlisted in the Air Corps as a cadet.

  The Polish immigrants’ son proved an adept and eager student, and after completing boot camp he was shipped to Lowry Field in Colorado. There he passed the Corps’ Chemical Warfare course, its advanced Aircraft Armorer course, and, finally, the intellectually rugged Bombsight Maintenance course. He was then promoted to sergeant and transferred to the 41st Reconnaissance Squadron of the 2nd Bomb Group, a part of the very unit soon to be spun off into a separate Bomb Group numbered the 43rd.

  Through all his travels and despite his workload, Joe wrote home as often as he could—his sister Matilda remembers how the family considered it “a big occasion” whenever a letter arrived. His mother answered his letters just as regularly, dictating her thoughts in Polish to one of her daughters, who would transcribe her words into English. She would also relay any comments from her more reticent yet equally proud husband. On his first Christmas furlough Joe took advantage of his $700 annual base salary to arrive back at the homestead with a new tricycle for his youngest brother, Francis, the baby of the family. It was the first store-bought gift any of the Sarnoski children had ever received, and the entire brood greeted Joe as if he were Santa Claus. It also convinced Matilda that he was not joking about buying her a wristwatch.

  After what Matilda remembered as “one of the best Christ
mases our family ever celebrated,” Joe returned to Langley to report to his new Bomb Group. Three months later the first B-17s began to arrive at the airbase for a series of operational flight tests. Joe took one look at the gleaming B-17 Flying Fortresses just assigned to his outfit and—like Jay Zeamer a few years later—fell in love.

  THE CLOSER JAY AND JOE grew, the more Jay came to admire the hardy bombardier. Here was someone who had known an economic despair that Jay had never suffered, yet there was always a smile dancing about his pale blue eyes. Both men gradually came to realize that they had more in common than their love of flight, and Jay was delighted to learn that before Joe had enlisted he’d finally saved enough money to purchase a decrepit Indian motorcycle that, like Jay with his boarding school jalopy, Joe had rebuilt nearly from scratch. Joe loved to take his bike out to explore the backcountry dirt trails that crisscrossed the wooded fields surrounding his family’s rural property, much as Jay had delighted in leading his Boy Scout excursions into the Maine forests.

  More urgently, by the summer of 1941 any Airmen with a modicum of military sense recognized that war with Germany was not far off, and the two often joked about how, if given the opportunity to fly together, they would drop a couple of 500-pounders down the chimney of Hitler’s Reichskanslei in Berlin and be home in time to watch Joe’s sister Matilda, in high school by this time, graduate as valedictorian.

  In mid-1941 Joe was transferred from Langley to serve as a bombing instructor in Bangor, Maine. He was so certain that his next posting would take him across the Atlantic that he and his girlfriend Marie—a Betty Grable look-alike from Richmond, Virginia, whom he had met at a mixer off-base—invited Jay to a small going-away dinner where they announced their engagement. Though Jay also saw his future in the skies somewhere above Europe, both men recognized that this might be the last they ever saw of each other until the war was over—if they survived it. Despite their jokes about being home for Matilda’s graduation, the increasingly shrill newspaper headlines left no doubt that the coming conflagration would be a long and bloody slog against Hitler and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of men and war machines.