To Kingdom Come

by Robert J. Mrazek

  After emerging from the plane, Bob Travis had a photograph taken with Bill Calhoun. From the two men’s casual demeanor, one might have thought they had just flown a training mission to Scotland.

  The mission had been one of the epic air battles of the war. In three hours, the Luftwaffe had launched more than four hundred attacks against the Eighth Air Force bombers, destroying sixty Fortresses and five escort fighters. Ten planes in the 303rd Bomb Group had been shot down around the 8 Ball. In spite of all the obstacles, the Fortresses had wrecked the Fw 190 factories at Oschersleben and destroyed thirty-nine enemy fighters.

  Bob Travis pronounced it a successful mission.

  That was no solace to many of the pilots in the 303rd. They were outraged that the general had not turned back with the five hundred bombers of the other two divisions when the recall order had been issued.

  One day later, the First Division’s group and squadron commanders met to discuss the mission. General Travis was the senior officer at the meeting. One of the squadron commanders asked him directly why he hadn’t turned back with the other two divisions.

  “I received no recall,” he said, ending the discussion.

  For the Oschersleben mission, the First Bombardment Division was awarded a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. Bob Travis wrote to his father two weeks later about his own most recent commendation.

  28 January 1944

  Dear Dad,

  My DFC citation reads, “For extraordinary achievement while leading a mission over Germany, 26 November 1943. . . . The high degree of success achieved on this mission can be attributed to the courage, unyielding determination and skillful leadership of General Travis.” ... Have no news ... Love, Bob

  His reward for leading the Oschersleben mission would be a second Silver Star.

  4 April 1944

  Dear Dad,

  A copy of the citation for the Oak Leaf Cluster to the Silver Star reads as follows: “For gallantry in action while leading a heavy bombardment division on a mission over Germany, 11 January 1944.... In spite of relentless attacks by hostile fighters, General Travis maintained perfect air discipline and maneuvered the formation over the assigned target. A crippling blow was dealt to one of the enemy’s most important units of war production. The outstanding success achieved is attributable to the tenacity of purpose and brilliant leadership of General Travis, whose gallantry was an inspiration to all members of his command.” The weather has been bad for days and we are stood down temporarily. Love, Bob

  On April 29, 1944, Bob Travis led the First Division in an attack on Berlin. More than seven hundred Fortresses participated in the raid, supported by sixteen fighter groups. Three hundred German fighters attempted to defend their capital.

  It was the only time he was wounded in combat.

  He was flying with the 303rd again, this time with Lieutenant Don Stoulil in the lead plane of the lead squadron. They had dropped their bombs on Berlin and were heading home when the group encountered an intense flak barrage over Hannover, Germany.

  Fifteen of the seventeen bombers in the 303rd received serious flak damage. Two were blown out of the sky, including Spirit of Wanette, which had been tucked in behind the left wing of General Travis’s plane.

  As 88-millimeter cannon shells exploded all around them, Don Stoulil fought to control the plane amid the buffeting flak bursts while an unruffled General Travis sat in the copilot’s seat writing mission notes on his legal-sized clipboard.

  Suddenly, a jagged two-inch-square hole materialized on the right side of the windshield, directly in front of the general. A moment later, shards of glass were swirling around the cockpit.

  Without a word, General Travis slumped forward, his head coming to rest on the clipboard. Seconds later, blood began trickling down the general’s left cheek. He sat motionless as the bomber continued to careen through the bumpy sky.

  Oh, shit, thought the young pilot. The old man is dead.

  He was still wrestling the plane through the stormy air when General Travis slowly raised himself back up to a sitting position. Stoulil called on the intercom for his waist gunner to come up to the cockpit with a first aid kit.

  They were at twenty thousand feet, and the gunner used one of the plane’s “walk around” oxygen bottles to reach the cockpit. After dressing the general’s flesh wound, he wrapped a white gauze bandage around his head.

  When they arrived back at Molesworth, Stoulil fired off a red flare to signal “wounded aboard” and brought the plane straight in to the hardstand. The general’s staff car was waiting for him.

  Ten minutes later, Don Stoulil was sitting in the cockpit filling out his after-flight “Form 1” on the postmission condition of the plane, when he looked down and saw that the general was still there, pointing out the hole in the windshield to a member of his staff. It couldn’t have been too serious, the young pilot decided.

  That night, the general came over to the squadron’s officers’ club. He was still wearing the heavy gauze bandage Don’s gunner had wrapped around his head during the mission. They all celebrated the general’s good fortune with a free round of drinks.

  He received his third Silver Star in May.

  17 May 1944

  Dear Dad,

  I thought you might be interested to know that I have received my second Oak Leaf cluster to the Silver Star, the citation for which reads as follows: “For gallantry in action, while serving as Air Commander of a Heavy Bombardment Division on a mission over Germany, 9 April 1944. Extremely adverse weather conditions over England made assembling of the units almost impossible.... It was not until General Travis was more than an hour’s flying time from the English coast that he was able to form a tight combat wing formation.... He led two combat wings along the briefed route to the target knowing full well that a serious shortage of fuel would develop later.... Determined to accomplish his assignment, General Travis maneuvered the formation through vicious attacks by enemy fighters and bombed the objective with excellent results.... He accomplished this so expertly that losses were held to a minimum. The gallantry and will to fight on against all odds displayed by General Travis inspired all units under his command.”

  Though there is much news, I must again apologize for being unable to pass it on to you due to censorship.... A letter from Uncle Jack states that your health is much improved and that you and Mother are both well. Your son, Bob

  5 July 1944

  Dear Dad,

  My latest Distinguished Flying Cross Citation is as follows: “For extraordinary achievement while serving as Air Commander on a heavy bombardment mission over Germany, 20 June 1944. On this date General Travis directed the formation on a successful attack on a vital enemy objective. For six minutes prior to the release of bombs, the aircraft in which General Travis was flying was subjected to an intense barrage of flak. The rudder controls were badly damaged and an engine shot out by one burst. Another hit destroyed the aileron controls and successive bursts further crippled the airplane. In spite of these obstacles, General Travis led the formation in a straight bombing run, insuring an accurate release of bombs. The unwavering determination ... courage, coolness and skill displayed by this officer reflect the highest credit on himself....”

  As I write this, my boys are landing from a morning mission. I see some red flares going up which means “wounded aboard.” Love, Bob

  The general’s final combat mission was to the marshaling yards at Mainz, Germany, on September 21, 1944. As always, he flew in the copilot’s seat, this time with Captain William E. Eisenhart of the 303rd. Their plane led the entire Eighth Air Force that day.

  Unlike so many of General Travis’s missions, the Mainz raid was relatively uneventful. The 303rd’s bombs were dropped squarely on the target. They were on their way home when something untoward occurred that would soon become a permanent part of group lore.

  A directive had recently been issued that pilots should not leave their cockpits to urinate if their piss tubes
were frozen during a high-altitude flight. It was recommended that the pilots crack open their side window, get on their haunches, and pass the urine through the open window, where it would be carried away by the slipstream.

  When Captain Eisenhart experienced an urge to urinate on the way back to Molesworth, he opened his window and attempted to comply with the directive. Unfortunately, General Travis was smoking a cigarette, and had cracked his own window open to release the smoke.

  Caught in a cross draft, Captain Eisenhart’s urine swirled across the cockpit, hitting the general full in the face. As soon as they landed, the general began dressing the pilot down, calling Captain Eisenhart an embarrassment to the Eighth Air Force. The tirade concluded with the general demanding that the directive about cockpit urination be removed from the bulletin board.

  In the following days, Captain Eisenhart became widely celebrated within the 303rd Bomb Group as the only junior officer to ever piss in the face of a general and not be court-martialed for it.

  Now Bob Travis was going home.

  For thirteen months, he had lived a charmed life in the air, surviving some of the most dangerous missions to Germany while one plane after another around him was blown out of the sky.

  Before Bob left England for a well-earned family leave, Major General Robert Williams, the commanding officer in the First Division, declared him to be the finest wing commander in the Eighth Air Force. He had done well, winning a chest full of combat decorations.

  Decorations usually led to promotions.

  Bob Travis was aiming for the top.

  Reb

  Monday, 25 December 1944

  Krems, Austria

  Stalag 17

  Barracks 18B

  Sergeant Olen “Reb” Grant

  Dearest Mother,

  It’s night here, but you probably haven’t sat down to eat Christmas dinner yet. We had plenty of snow this morning and the sun came out nice and bright. By noon it had clouded up again. I sat up until three o’clock last night thinking of you and Sis and Dad and Hugh and Lamar.... A man does a lot of thinking here and I have found all the mistakes I have made and I’ll see that they don’t happen again. Mother, when I get home we will celebrate Christmas all over again. Until then God bless you all and keep well and safe. All my love, Olen

  The 1944 Christmas dinner menu at Stalag 17 was neither mouth-watering nor expansive. It consisted of cabbage soup, raw carrots, a slice of coarse bread, and cold tap water. The prisoners enjoyed the same meal almost every day. On special occasions, the soup was flavored with small chunks of horse meat.

  Reb Grant was celebrating his second Christmas at Stalag 17. Since November 1943, he had lived in Barracks 18, a one-story wood-frame building that housed five hundred men. They slept in three-tiered bunks that ran along the rough-board walls. After six months of captivity, he had secured a prized second-tier bunk near the center of the building, which remained slightly warmer during the harsh winters.

  The barracks had no stove. Warmth was provided by the body heat of the men. There was a wash room in the center of the long building that had a half dozen cold-water taps. There were no sinks. The water ran into an open trench beneath the barracks floor.

  A walkway ran down the center of the building. With the snow and mud, it had several inches of packed dirt along much of its length. There were no brooms or mops to clean up the mess.

  Lice, fleas, and bedbugs ran rampant. Most of the men hadn’t been able to bathe in months. The smell of their bodies was ferocious and constant. Dysentery was common, and the latrines were some distance away. If a man needed to relieve himself at night, there was a two-seat privy at each end of the building. No man left the barracks at night. Several had been shot doing so.

  For Reb Grant, the conditions weren’t all that intolerable. He was used to hard living. During the Depression, his whole family had lived in a single tent with no running water after his father, Eli, had gotten a job wildcatting at an oil field near Longview, Texas.

  Aside from the stinging cold, he hated the boredom more than anything else.

  In one important way, this Christmas was different from the last one in 1943. According to the camp rumor mill, there was a big battle going on in the Ardennes Forest, with the Germans claiming they had driven the Allied army back to the sea. Of course, one couldn’t accept anything they said at face value.

  It was clear to all of them by then that the Germans had lost the war. It was only a matter of time before either the Americans or the Russians broke through. The prisoners simply had to survive until that day came.

  Their principal fear stemmed from another rumor that Hitler had ordered the execution of all the captured bomber crews that had wreaked so much death and havoc on the Fatherland. There was no reason to doubt that this order could still be carried out.

  All in all, Reb thought he was pretty damn lucky. It was a miracle that he had survived the crash of Yankee Raider. After regaining consciousness in the Paris hospital, he had slowly regained his strength. Once he was able to sit up, the nurses transferred him to a chair next to his bed. He had spent many hours gazing out the window of his ward.

  The converted military hospital was located next to the Seine River. A soccer field separated the hospital from it. Every day, the Luftwaffe air defense units that manned the antiaircraft batteries around Paris would be marched to the field for calisthenics and soccer games.

  The Germans would always arrive in marching order singing military songs so loudly that the music carried straight up to his window. After the games and exercise periods were over, they would reassemble to march back to their units, still singing. Reb decided that they were the singingest people in the whole world.

  There was one German nurse who he found very attractive. She was the blond assistant to the doctor who was treating his wound. Even with the right side of his face blown away, he thought there was something going on. The old rebel still had it, he decided.

  “Here is the Englander,” she would always say in a sarcastic tone when he arrived to have his dressing changed.

  “I’m not English,” he would reply hotly. “I’m an American.”

  Behind all the sarcasm, Reb was sure she liked him.

  In October, they brought in two American pilots from a downed B-24. The fliers had been splashed with leaking hydraulic fluid inside their burning plane, and the fluid caught fire before they bailed out. Their bodies were terribly burned. To Reb, it looked like their faces had melted away. When the first one regained consciousness, he glanced at himself in a hand mirror and said he could never go home again.

  In late October, Reb’s doctor told him that the infection in his head wound had been stabilized and he would soon be able to leave. A few days later, he was escorted to the main entrance of the hospital to join three other Allied airmen who were being released the same day.

  They were loaded into the back of a truck and taken to Saint-Lazare train station.

  On the train platform, a shoe shine boy, as black as the children Reb had grown up with in El Dorado, Arkansas, came scrambling through the sea of passengers. He stopped at Reb’s feet and, using sign language, asked if he wanted his shoes shined. Looking down at the little boy’s searching eyes reminded him of home, and he found himself crying.

  It was snowing by the time the train left the station, and they traveled all night. When the train arrived at Frankfurt, Germany, Reb smelled the smoke before he saw the fires that were raging across the city. It had been bombed the night before, and panic-stricken Germans were lined up at the station, waiting to take the same train he had just arrived on.

  The four Allied prisoners were being escorted by four German soldiers, all of them armed with light machine guns. Reb had made a joke in the train about the need for four Aryan supermen to escort four invalids who had just left a hospital.

  On the platform, his thinking changed.

  The fear on the faces of the Germans turned to rage when they saw the men under guard,
including an RAF flier in his flight suit. Word coursed through the crowd that these were some of the men who had bombed Frankfurt.

  The mass of frightened people suddenly became a raging mob. They surrounded the small group and began screaming for vengeance. The German guards shoved their way through as the mob kicked and clawed at the airmen.

  Two men began dragging Reb out of the slow procession and into the clutch of the others. He knew they would beat him to death. It was a close result. He was only reprieved when one of the German soldiers opened fire with his machine gun into the air.

  The four were taken to a holding camp outside Frankfurt. It was surrounded by barbed wire. Inside the camp, he was placed in an unheated five-by-eight-foot cell with an iron door.

  In his first interrogation, he was told that since he wasn’t wearing a dog tag when he was first captured, the Germans had to assume he was an American spy. Spies were shot.

  Reb tried to explain why he didn’t have his dog tag: that he had taken the tag off back at his base in England before taking a shower. The interrogator said he didn’t believe him.

  The next morning, Reb heard the sound of gunfire and his imagination began to run wild. Along the cell block, the iron doors were being opened and slammed shut. Were they taking men out into the field and executing them?

  In his next interrogation, the interrogator again demanded to know who he really was. Over the next few days, he kept repeating the same story while continuing to give them his name, rank, and serial number.

  By then, his facial wounds had become infected again. The dressing over his eye had not been changed since he left Paris. An RAF doctor who was also a prisoner in the camp finally changed it a week after he arrived.

  Reb was being held in another cell when he saw that some of the recent Allied prisoners had scratched their names on the wall. His good eye was drawn to one of the names.