Given her size, the QE’s speed was all the more impressive. She measured 1,630 feet in length and 118 feet in width. The eleven thousand passengers now aboard were scattered among fourteen decks stacked inside the massive hull. To maintain order, each passenger was restricted to one of three living zones. Meals were an hours-long feat, with queues of men snaking along corridors and decks to await their turn in the cavernous restaurant. Troops messed in the ship’s main restaurant in groups of two thousand, scheduled by color-coded cards. The kitchen staff prepared more than thirty thousand meals a day, which troops consumed using their own mess kits and utensils.1
Ben spent much of the voyage helping out in the galley. Given the warm weather, he preferred sleeping under the stars in a coil of the ship’s lines rather than wedging himself into one of the claustrophobic three-tiered bunks below decks. The 93rd had been joined by several other contingents destined for duty with the Eighth Air Force in England, including the ground echelon of the 306th Bomb Group, a B-17 outfit, and the 3rd Photographic Group, which flew P-38 Lightnings. Other outfits making the passage included the 62nd Troop Carrier Group and the 67th Reconnaissance Group.
Ben was asleep in his topside coil of rope one night when someone shook him awake. It was a 93rd comrade who introduced himself as a fellow Nebraskan named Cal Stewart. A newspaper printer’s devil and cub reporter before the war, Carroll (Cal) Stewart was assigned to the 93rd as a public affairs officer. Like many of the 93rd men, Stewart was miserably seasick during the voyage. One of the highlights of the passage for him was meeting Ben, and they became fast friends in the months ahead.2
For three days, the voyage proceeded without incident. On the final night at sea, a sudden vibration jolted the ship and threw some of the men from their bunks. The captain had been alerted to the presence of a U-boat wolf pack in the area, and so he swiftly executed a sweeping 360-degree maneuver to confuse any pursuers. After several anxious minutes, the alarm passed and the mighty ship continued on her eastward course.
On the late afternoon of Friday, September 4, the coast of Scotland came into view. Easing through the Firth of Clyde, the Queen Elizabeth dropped anchor off the Tail of the Bank, at the mouth of the River Clyde. From his vantage point on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, amid the gloom of a pelting rain and gathering darkness, Ben caught his first glimpse of the European war zone.
Chapter 8
“CHINAMAN BOY”
On the morning of September 5, 1942, in intermittent showers and patchy sunlight, Ben and his comrades were ferried ashore at Greenock, Scotland, on the south bank of the River Clyde. At the time, Greenock was a town of red-brick houses “scattered over the dark, heath-covered hills rising up from the river,” one 93rd member recorded. Wearing helmets and lugging barracks bags, the last of the 93rd men shuffled into the town’s central rail station at four-thirty in the afternoon. There, a Scottish band piped the Americans aboard a waiting train. Settling into their seats, the 93rd men were served dry buns and unsweetened tea “by smiling lassies with whom we flirted and tossed chocolate bars and gum as they passed beneath our windows.”1
In the fading twilight, the train headed inland in a steady rain. “We looked out upon the cheerless, rain-soaked streets and houses of farms and villages and rocky hills that were racing by,” the anonymous 93rd observer later wrote. “In a doorway amid a row of bombed houses along the track was a lonely old woman who waved to us as we raced by.” They rolled through Glasgow, Scotland’s most populous city, and east to Edinburgh, the capital, where they stopped for tea. Shortly after leaving Edinburgh in the early evening, the men heard air raid sirens and the train lurched to a stop. Defying orders on air raid protocol, the excited men rushed to the windows to see what an attack looked like. “Suddenly the whole countryside was illuminated by bright flares dropped from Jerry planes,” the 93rd chronicler recorded. “It gave us a feeling of nakedness and that Jerry could see us looking out the windows.”2
The flash of antiaircraft guns lit the night sky and the rumble of exploding bombs sounded in the distance. An enemy plane exploded in a red flash. Some of the men nervously joked that the Germans were “after us.” A major anxiously made his way through the cars, asking if anyone had seen his helmet. “I did,” teased a lieutenant. “Lewis pissed in it and I threw it out the window.” Everyone laughed. The air raid ended and the train began to roll again.
As the night wore on, a chill seeped into the cars. Some of the men huddled close in the blue-lit compartments, trying to sleep. Others played cards. One recurring game of poker was dominated by a crafty sergeant who had repeatedly fleeced the same boys since leaving Florida.
Daybreak of Sunday, September 6, revealed the emerald English countryside, with its patchwork of farms, hedgerows, and country lanes. In the village of Alconbury, fifty miles north of London, the 93rd men exited the train with their bags. Their new home lay outside the village: a former RAF base, now designated Station 102.
BEN AND HIS COMRADES WHO HAD CROSSED the North Atlantic by sea were welcomed to the base by the vanguard of the 93rd combat crews who had arrived at Alconbury by air in new olive-drab B-24D bombers. Bad weather had delayed the crews in Newfoundland, and they had survived a harrowing all-night flight through even worse weather. Despite anxious moments, thirty-five of thirty-six combat crews who left Newfoundland found their way to Alconbury.
The one aircraft that didn’t turn up was a B-24 named Friday’s Cat, and it had disappeared without a trace in the hours before reaching Scotland. There was speculation that the missing boys had gone off course in stormy weather over the North Atlantic and had exhausted their fuel, or the pilot had experienced vertigo and drove the aircraft straight down to their deaths in the sea somewhere south of England. The men’s squadron commander was a big-hearted lieutenant colonel named Addison E. Baker, a renowned stunt pilot in Ohio in the 1930s. Now one of Baker’s first acts at Alconbury was writing condolence letters to the families of the ten missing men of Friday’s Cat.
With an understrength roster of eighteen hundred men, including four hundred trained combat crewmen, the 93rd was the first American B-24 bomber outfit to reach England. More crews and planes were on the way. Ben and his comrades had arrived at a moment when General Ira Eaker, the Eighth Air Force bomber commander, was trying to build on three weeks of modest raids on targets in occupied France. Since leading his men on their combat debut to France on August 17, Eaker had lost ten B-17s—nearly one-quarter of his force—while logging ten bombing missions.
Eaker was filled with a sense of urgency, for he had recently been informed that the Eighth would be losing many of its fighters, bombers, and combat crews to the planned fall invasion of northwest Africa, now codenamed Operation TORCH. Eaker had been assured by Hap Arnold and army chief of staff General George Marshall that the Eighth would be left with enough bombers and crews “to continue some sort of strategic offensive,” but Eaker was uneasy. The clock was ticking. But Eaker first needed to teach his new crews the survival skills they hadn’t been taught in their truncated stateside training.
For the remainder of September, the 93rd’s combat crews attended ground classes and flew practice flights. They learned how to take off in sequence, climb to an assigned rally altitude, then slip into a designated spot in twenty-four plane squadron formations circling above the countryside. More often than not, this feat would have to be accomplished in sloppy weather. There was much to learn, and the deficiencies in their training weren’t lost on the 93rd men. “When we went over, we weren’t trained at all,” recalled Rollin Reineck, the navigator of a 93rd B-24 named Jerk’s Natural. “All we had done was patrol over the Gulf. We had to learn to fly formations. We didn’t have any training in high altitude bombing or anything of that nature.”3
WHILE COLONEL TIMBERLAKE’S TOP priority was getting his aircrews ready for combat, his men were eager to reconnoiter their new surroundings.
For Ben, the countryside surrounding the base stirred memories of home. The group mess hall and the tents that served as temporary barracks for some of the 93rd men were surrounded by fields of sugar beets, one of the Kuroki family’s specialties. Ben was struck by the small size of the farms and the lack of mechanization. In nearby fields, women harvested hay with hand tools and a horse-drawn cart. “It takes them a week to harvest this small patch,” Ben remarked to one of his friends. “Back home we do it in a day.”4
A little more than a mile away from the base lay the village of Alconbury, namesake for the RAF base established in this spot in 1938. The village and surrounding civil parish were home to about five hundred souls. Alconbury sat astride the ancient Great North Road as it ran from London, sixty-five miles to the south, to Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly three hundred miles to the north. Even closer to the air base was the hamlet of Little Stukeley, population two hundred. The pubs of Alconbury, Little Stukeley, and other nearby villages and hamlets introduced the curious American airmen to their exotic new world.
The staple beverage in the pubs was dark beer served at room temperature and consumed in prodigious amounts. It was an acquired taste for the American airmen, but the warm and hospitable company made the unfamiliar brew more palatable. In theory, the men and the village pub-goers spoke the same language, but the Americans could scarcely comprehend the heavily accented English spoken by locals. The airmen and their hosts were content to smile and nod and sip, satisfied they were among friends.
The base had been carved from an old farm, and the fields on which crops had grown for centuries were now crisscrossed by a triangle of intersecting runways. A perimeter track connected small hardstands on which the 93rd’s Liberators were parked. The spires of nine country churches marked the location of Alconbury, Little Stukeley, and other villages and hamlets. The air base was located in the county of Huntingdonshire. To the west lay old manor houses and the occasional monastery, while to the east lay fertile fenland reclaimed from North Sea marshes in centuries past.5
Housing eighteen hundred American airmen posed a challenge to the 93rd commanders and their British hosts. Ben and many of the enlisted men found themselves sharing tents pitched under copses of old oaks. Many of the officers settled into prefabricated Nissen huts erected in an area known as Skunk Hollow, in the shadow of a thirteenth-century church where Chaplain James Burris presided over Protestant worship services as gray light streamed through lovely lancet windows. The plumbing was primitive—cold-water showers and squat toilets. The modest quarters were warmed by coal-burning heaters. A few dozen combat officers were housed in style three miles from the base in a gabled Elizabethan manor bearing the stately name of Upton House. Enlisted men housed on the manor grounds were relegated to tents.6
With a spirit of adventure and curiosity that belied the dangerous work that had brought them to England, the 93rd men began to explore the pubs and inns, churches, castles, and cemeteries of the ancient world they had suddenly entered. Among the many new friends that the 93rd men counted was the prominent British Conservative Party politician George Montagu—the Earl of Sandwich—and his Chicago-born wife, Alberta Sturges, Countess of Sandwich. The Earl and Countess warmly welcomed the American airmen into their castle-like mansion in Huntingdon.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship for the 93rd men as they prepared to join the fight to the death against Nazi Germany.
FROM THE MOMENT HE CAME ASHORE at Greenock, Ben had been struck by the lack of interest in his ethnicity by the locals he encountered in Scotland and England. There were no suspicious looks or raised eyebrows or offensive comments. It really seemed as if the people he met didn’t care about his ancestry.
The same couldn’t be said about his army comrades. His treatment by the men of the 93rd was far better than he’d gotten during his first months of military service, but Ben still faced the occasional offensive comment. A drunk American spotted him in a bar and described him to an English friend as a “Chinaman boy” and a “good boy” who wasn’t like “those lousy Japs” who were “being kicked out of California.” Even close friends highlighted his heritage by giving him nicknames like “Hara-Kiri.”7 The incidents were rarer, but they made Ben cringe.
Still wary of giving his superiors any reason to ship him home, Ben stayed away from dances and parties. He felt most comfortable exploring alone or with a few friends. He shared the sense of wonder of most of his comrades as he savored his surroundings at Alconbury. He developed a taste for tea at the air base Red Cross Club. Venturing beyond Alconbury and other nearby villages and hamlets, he toured the old university town of Cambridge and took in his first ballet.8 When Ben and his comrades were stuck on the base, they slept, wrote letters, played cards, shot craps, or sat around shooting the bull about life in general.
Ben had already made a name for himself by showing up at the flight line each morning to plead for a crew assignment. He didn’t get his wish, but his eagerness was noted. He would watch as the bombers took off to practice formation flying or simulated bombing runs using live ordnance on imaginary targets in The Wash, the protected bay and estuary off the coast of East Anglia. He felt he was getting the runaround in his appeals for a crew assignment, and that tested Ben’s patience. But he wasn’t the only impatient man in the 93rd as September drew to a close. The combat crews were tired of training and eager for action.
On October 4, the 93rd crews were finally briefed for a mission. As the departure hour approached, the men were ordered to stand down because of bad weather. The disappointment among the aircrews and ground personnel was palpable.
The raid was rescheduled for the following day and the crews steeled themselves again, only to endure the disappointment of another cancellation because of bad weather. An officer in Ben’s squadron noted the rising tension among the men as they awaited their first action. “Aircrews very anxious to get on a mission,” the officer observed in the squadron diary.9 The 93rd still hadn’t crossed the English Channel into occupied enemy territory and they still hadn’t faced a shot fired in anger. Yet the strain was already starting to weigh on some of the men.
Chapter 9
“HEY, THEY’RE SHOOTING AT US!”
On October 9, 1942, the 93rd finally made its long-awaited combat debut. The target was a locomotive manufacturing complex in Lille, France, about forty-five miles inland from Dunkirk. The crews were awakened in darkness, ate breakfast, then assembled for the pre-mission briefing. Intelligence officers apprised the men on expected enemy antiaircraft fire and fighter resistance. The weather officer covered visibility, cloud cover, and wind forecasts in the target area. But the climax was a rousing pep talk from group commander Ted Timberlake. “This is the day we’ve waited for and for gosh sake, fly a tight formation and put those bombs on target,” Timberlake exhorted. “I know you Joes can do it.”1
Rather than send his boys into combat with a speech and a pat on the back, Timberlake announced that he would lead the mission. When the briefing broke up, he climbed into a B-24 named for his baby daughter, Teggie Ann.
For Ben and other men watching from the ground, the tension built as ninety-six Pratt & Whitney engines around the airfield perimeter roared to life. The collective concern in the anxious hour that followed centered on whether the pilots could get their heavily loaded bombers into the air. A flare streaked from the control tower’s viewing platform, and at 7:47 a.m. Timberlake revved his engines and released his brakes. Teggie Ann roared down the runway with a full fuel load and twelve five-hundred-pound bombs in her bay racks.
As Timberlake coaxed Teggie Ann into the sky, the other bombers followed at thirty-second intervals. With each aircraft near its maximum 62,000-pound gross weight, the pilots sweated the takeoff. One after another, the B-24s rose into the sky. Twelve minutes after Teggie Ann started the procession, the last Liberator on the runway disappeared into the mist.
