Timberlake’s twenty-four aircraft took off in two groups. Their destination lay more than a thousand miles to the south on a straight line, but their planned route would add several hundred miles to the journey to avoid a possible conflict with the forces of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the target of delicate US diplomatic negotiations to keep officially neutral Spain out of the war. Timberlake didn’t like the fact that he and his men would reach French Algeria well after dark if they flew the assigned route, so, ignoring orders, he climbed to fourteen thousand feet and led his vanguard of six planes over Spain. Timberlake’s group touched down at Tafaraoui Aerodrome, just south of Oran, Algeria, in the late afternoon.
Jake Epting and his Red Ass crew were assigned to the second flight, which flew the stipulated route. By the time the second contingent reached the Straits of Gibraltar, dusk was settling over the Mediterranean coast of northwest Africa. As the B-24s flew east through the straits, French antiaircraft gunners opened fire from positions along the coast of Morocco.
The antiaircraft fire and gathering darkness set the 93rd men on edge. By the time the second 93rd flight reached Oran, mist and rain had moved in and visibility was deteriorating. The city and the surrounding area were blacked out. Their destination lay only a few miles south of Oran, but there were mountains around the field, and the personnel at Tafaraoui Aerodrome had done nothing to mark the location for the 93rd crews. Some of the pilots couldn’t locate the airfield, and some were “afraid to turn on their purple formation lights, lest they attract enemy fighters,” pilot Al Asch recalled. “We started circling where we thought the field was. Finally, extending from a truck’s headlights was a string of kerosene-fueled flare pots strung in a single line dimly marking the runway.” Colonel Timberlake radioed and told Asch and the others to land on the north side of the flares; the other side was lined with aircraft.3
Among the 93rd pilots struggling to find Tafaraoui’s poorly lit runway in the dark and rain was a strapping Iowa native named Lieutenant Robert A. Johnson. Better known to his comrades as Ox because of his muscular six-foot, 188-pound frame, the twenty-one-year-old Johnson was a much-loved figure in the group. In the challenging conditions, Johnson’s navigator may have forgotten his maps measured the local mountains in meters. In any event, Bob Johnson crashed into one of those mountains, killing all aboard.4
The Epting crew avoided that fate and rolled to a stop on Tafaraoui’s short runway. With stiff muscles after the long and arduous flight, Ben and his crewmates dropped from the fuselage of Red Ass onto African soil.
Ben had never been so close to combat, and the knowledge that he would finally get the chance to prove himself under fire was cause for euphoria and anxiety. But the loss of beloved comrades served as a sobering reminder to Ben and his crewmates: Death would be their ever-present companion as they faced off against Axis fighter planes and flak crews in the battle for North Africa.
Chapter 13
“NOW, I BELONG”
Anticipating a balmy respite from England’s chilly autumn weather, the 93rd airmen arrived in Algeria to a cold rain and shabby accommodations. Their new home at Tafaraoui Airfield was a former French naval air cadet training station that had fallen into disrepair. The men were issued mattress covers filled with straw and shown to a low-slung building that would serve as a barracks. The iron beds were so uncomfortable that most of the men spread their mattresses on the clammy concrete floor. When it was discovered that cracks in the walls teemed with bedbugs, some of the men decided to sleep beneath their planes. That option lost its appeal when a steady rain became a sustained downpour, sending the airmen scurrying back to their quarters. After a wet and restless night, many of them awoke with colds.1
Daylight brought orders to prepare the 93rd Liberators for a mission, but more rain forced a cancellation a few hours later. The rain didn’t relent for three days. With each passing day, the 93rd’s new airfield more closely resembled a swamp.
When the skies finally cleared, Twelfth Air Force headquarters ordered Colonel Timberlake to get his men ready for a mission. The 93rd commander protested that the field was too soggy for his heavy bombers to leave the flight line, but he was curtly overruled.
Ben took his position as a gunner in Red Ass as B-24 engines around the field roared to life. The first plane to roll out of its parking spot was a Liberator named Geronimo. As it sloshed toward the runway, Geronimo mired in knee-deep mud. When the pilots tried to coax the aircraft forward by increasing the power, the nosewheel collapsed and the bomber’s forward section plopped unceremoniously into the mud. A furious Timberlake ordered his aircraft to hold in place while he reported the mishap to headquarters. With Timberlake’s warnings validated at the cost of one of his precious B-24s, his Twelfth Air Force superiors canceled the mission.2
The 93rd’s North Africa sojourn was off to a shaky start.
THE RAIN RESUMED, BUT WITH AMERICAN and British ground forces facing grave peril amid a German counterattack in Tunisia, the Twelfth Air Force headquarters brusquely ordered Timberlake to get his bombers off the ground on December 13. The 93rd’s assigned target was Bizerte, a bustling port critical to German field marshal Albert Kesselring’s ongoing efforts to expand the Axis bridgehead in Tunisia. Bizerte was Africa’s northernmost city, only 110 miles south of Sardinia and 145 miles southwest of Sicily. From Tafaraoui, Bizerte was a 600-mile one-way flight—a little more than three hours at B-24 cruising speed.
Timberlake finally extricated his bombers from the Tafaraoui mud and got them airborne without mishap. Inside Red Ass, Ben settled into his assigned area around the waist windows in the rear third of the fuselage.
From nose to tail, the length of the B-24D aircraft flown by the 93rd at the time was about sixty-five feet. The internal layout effectively compartmentalized the ten crew members individually or into small groups. In the cockpit, command pilot Jake Epting occupied the left seat and copilot Hap Kendall the right seat. Their radio operator sat at a small table just behind them. The nose compartment, located below the cockpit, was occupied by the navigator and bombardier. A forward area between the bomb bay and the cockpit was the duty station for the flight engineer, who monitored the engines and other mechanical systems during flight and doubled as the top turret gunner.
At the other end of the plane, the defense of Red Ass from enemy fighters was anchored by one of Ben’s new friends, tail gunner Elmer (Bill) Dawley. The nineteen-year-old from East Orange, New Jersey, sat inside a Plexiglas turret that afforded 270-degree coverage of the area behind the aircraft and to either side. Ben and two other men were responsible for machine guns mounted in the two waist windows on either side of the tube-like fuselage and a “tunnel gun” fired through a small Plexiglas bubble in the floor. (Later B-24 models were equipped with a swiveling ball turret rather than a tunnel gun.)
The three-hour flight to Bizerte took the 93rd bombers over a verdant coastal plain of wheat and rice fields, olive orchards, and palm groves. As the aircraft climbed above ten thousand feet, one of the gunners reminded Ben to put on his bulky oxygen mask. Approaching the target area, Ben could see the bomb bay doors of nearby bombers open.
Without warning, bursting antiaircraft shells engulfed the bombers, rocking Red Ass with concussion waves. As the B-24s released their bombs on the docks and harbor below, some of the unfortunate souls in harm’s way included several hundred Jews from Tunis who had been forced to perform war-related work by German troops.3
Lying in wait for the B-24s was a veteran contingent of German fighter pilots—part of a much larger Axis air force than Allied commanders had anticipated in planning Operation TORCH. Intelligence officers had estimated the Germans would be able to muster no more than 515 warplanes in the defense of Tunisia. In fact, the Germans had massed nearly 700 transport planes and more than 850 fighters and bombers.4 Now, in the skies over Bizerte, Timberlake’s B-24s experienced the intensity of the German air resistance.
Seconds after the B-24s released their bombs, Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighters attacked. A piece of shrapnel from an exploding shell smashed through the Red Ass tail turret and into the head of Bill Dawley. As blood poured from Dawley’s wound, Ben and the two gunners around him tried to defend the crew from the slashing enemy fighters. The fighters darted in and out of the bomber formation in attacks of dizzying speed. Ben had never experienced such fear. Suddenly, smoke erupted from a B-24 nearby and the bomber dropped from the formation.5
Once the B-24s outran the enemy fighters, Red Ass copilot Hap Kendall scrambled back to attend to Dawley. He was poised to jab a morphine syrette into the tail gunner’s leg when Ben remembered an instructor’s admonition during his gunnery training in England: A morphine injection could be fatal for someone with a head wound. Ben frantically gestured and made himself clear to the copilot: No morphine for a head wound.6
It wasn’t clear whether Dawley would survive the flight back to Tafaraoui, but he did. As Red Ass rolled to a stop, an ambulance appeared and the wounded tail gunner was loaded inside and rushed to a nearby hospital.
Two 93rd crews were missing, their fate unknown for the time being.
The stricken B-24 that Ben had watched drop from the formation was piloted by Lieutenant John Roche, a lanky Iowa farm boy who had earned the nickname of Packy. He had named his aircraft Ambrose, after St. Ambrose College, which he had attended in Davenport, Iowa. After Ben watched Ambrose drop from the formation, Roche lost all four engines. He was attempting a dead-stick landing on a dirt airstrip along the Algeria coast at Bône (now Annaba) when he hit a gully in the middle of the field. The nosewheel snapped, and as Ambrose rose on its nose the fuselage snapped and three members of Roche’s crew died in the wreckage. Roche and his six surviving crewmen spent a cold night watching over their dead while waiting for help to arrive.7
The mission was marred by one final tragedy. Over the target, a B-24 named Flying Cock was hit by flak and the crew’s bombardier, Lieutenant John T. Sparks, suffered “a horrible head wound,” pilot Llewellyn (Lew) Brown of Malvern, Arkansas, later recalled. It was clear that Sparks wouldn’t survive the flight back to Tafaraoui, so Brown made an emergency landing on the nearest Allied fighter strip he could find. The injuries suffered by Sparky, as he was known to comrades, proved fatal. He was buried in the Allied El Alia Cemetery in Algiers.8
Ben’s first battle left him with conflicting emotions. He felt relief at finally earning membership in the exclusive fraternity of 93rd warriors after “the loneliest and longest year of my life, walking on eggshells, fearful that one wrong move or one incident, right or wrong, would jeopardize my chances to prove my loyalty.” Now, “for the first time, I belonged.” But the terrifying experience of flying through exploding enemy shells had convinced him that he didn’t have long to live. Alone with his thoughts, Ben contemplated fears that he didn’t dare share with his comrades. I’m going to be lucky if I make it through ten missions.
A DOZEN 93RD BOMBERS BOMBED BIZERTE again the following day, but Jake Epting’s crew was among those that got the day off. The two missions flown from Tafaraoui Airfield were enough to convince Colonel Timberlake that his bombers needed a new home with a drier climate and longer runway. Timberlake’s bosses at Twelfth Air Force headquarters agreed.
On December 17, the 93rd crews packed their gear and bade good riddance to Tafaraoui. In a nine-hour flight that spanned fifteen hundred miles, the 93rd crews flew eastward to Gambut (now Kambut), Libya, site of a British air force base near the border with Egypt. What was supposed to be a quick ten-day jaunt to North Africa had now become an open-ended adventure for Ben and his comrades.9
Chapter 14
GAMBUT
Throughout the night of December 17–18, 1942, Ben and his 93rd comrades flew eastward across North Africa. After losing fourteen men in eleven days since leaving England, disconcerting questions nagged the crews. What would they be asked to do next? How ferociously would the enemy resist their raids? How many more of them would die in the days ahead? The men were left alone with these thoughts as the Liberators droned toward the dawn.
Far below lay the land and sea on which the epic North Africa campaign had unfolded over the past two years. They passed over the current battlefields of Tunisia, where the failure of the Allied race to Tunis had tipped momentum to the Germans. They crossed Tunisia’s east coast and headed out over the Mediterranean, with Ben and other gunners keeping a watchful eye out for enemy night fighters as they skirted Axis-held Libya.
Not quite six weeks earlier, the British had stunned German field marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt. The vaunted Desert Fox had saved the bulk of his army, but only after abandoning seventy-five thousand Italian troops to a sacrificial rearguard action. Rommel’s survivors had been in an inexorable retreat ever since, ceding territory under ground and air attacks.
The previous week had witnessed more setbacks for Rommel in running battles with British general Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. Rommel had been arguing bitterly with Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring over the proper course of action. It was Rommel’s view that Libya was lost and that he should concentrate his forces in Tunisia, but Libya was the last piece of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s African empire, and Il Duce wasn’t ready to accept its loss. In recent days, Mussolini had ordered Rommel to make a stand at El Agheila, a Libyan coastal town notorious as the site of an earlier concentration camp where Italian colonial forces had brutally incarcerated ten thousand Bedouin tribesmen. Hitler concurred with Mussolini’s latest request, and so Rommel had ordered his men to prepare to meet the British.
What made the futile stand even more bitter for Rommel was Hitler’s diversion of reinforcements and supplies from his battered army to Kesselring’s Tunisian bridgehead. Rommel was determined not to sacrifice his Panzer Army in a futile last stand, and so when the British attacked his lines around El Agheila, he began withdrawing his forces on the night of December 12. Now, as Timberlake’s men marked their seventh hour in the air while flying over the Mediterranean gulf that separated the Libyan provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, Ben and his comrades passed about ninety miles north of Rommel’s dispirited army.
Crossing the gulf’s eastern shore near the Libyan city of Benghazi, only recently reclaimed from Rommel’s forces, the weary 93rd men once again entered Allied-controlled airspace. Finally, in the morning light of December 18, their new home came into view.
Emerging from the fuselage of Red Ass, Ben beheld a stark and treeless landscape. The forlorn airfield had been established by Italian forces in 1939, and it had changed hands four times in the fighting between Axis and Allied forces over the past two years. From this bleak outpost, Ted Timberlake’s 93rd airmen were poised to play a crucial role in the quest for victory in North Africa.
