THE WEATHER FINALLY BROKE ON JANUARY 5, and the 93rd crews were briefed and climbed into their aircraft for takeoff. For the Epting crew, it would be their first combat mission in nine days. Their target was the port area of Tunis, but weather forced a diversion to their alternate target, the port of Sousse, seventy-five miles south of Tunis, on Tunisia’s east coast. Ben spent ten-and-a-half hours in the air, much of that seated in the cold and cramped tail turret of Red Ass, keeping an eye out for prowling enemy fighters. The mission was otherwise uneventful, and when Ben emerged from the belly of Red Ass, he had earned his first combat award: the Air Medal, bestowed on an airman for every five combat missions completed.
As if the commanders of the bomb groups didn’t have enough worries with the weather and the combat fatigue among their men, the condition of their aircraft now loomed as an issue. The sandstorms had begun to take a toll on the Liberators, and this became apparent during missions. The 328th Squadron commander, a 1941 West Point graduate named Joe Tate, didn’t even attempt a takeoff on the January 5 mission because of aircraft performance issues. The pilot of Hot Freight had turned back because his number three engine kept cutting out.
The sun had emerged in the aftermath of the latest storms, but the weather had turned cold. January 6 was an off day for the airmen, and it happened to be one of the nicest days since their arrival at Gambut. The sun shone and temperatures warmed to the point that Doc Paine and others stripped down to cut-off khaki shorts to soak up some rays. Several of the men organized a raucous softball game. When Ben muffed an attempt to catch a fly ball, one of his crewmates expressed mock outrage and called on the Japanese American gunner to “commit hara kiri” to atone for his miscue. The officers watching the game laughed and Ben played along.9
The 93rd was back in action the following day, January 7, and their target marked a new milestone: They were to attack Italy for the first time, striking Palermo, the largest city on the island of Sicily and the port of origin for many of the ships now funneling supplies to the two Axis armies in North Africa. Palermo was a 750-mile flight from Gambut for the 93rd bombers.
Jake Epting and his men were among the 93rd crews selected to fly the raid. They were briefed at 9:00 a.m. and took off at noon. The mission called for twelve 93rd aircraft to rendezvous with another twelve B-24s from the 98th and the 376th. The plan quickly unraveled when two 93rd aircraft aborted en route to the target because of mechanical problems and the dozen 98th and 376th bombers returned to Gambut Main because of bad weather. The 93rd’s remaining ten aircraft, Epting’s Red Ass among them, pressed on in the gathering twilight.
Arriving over Palermo harbor, Red Ass bombardier Al Naum dropped his bombs without incident and navigator Edward Weir set a course for Gambut Main. Ten hours after departure, Epting and copilot Hap Kendall landed at Gambut Main. It was a triumph for Ben and his crewmates and the other 93rd men who carried out the mission; they had taken the war to the Italian enemy’s homeland for the first time, and they had done so without a single casualty.
No mission was scheduled for January 8, which allowed the men to spend a leisurely day lolling around the camp. Shortly after nightfall, air-raid sirens wailed and the men scanned the skies for signs of enemy marauders. Flares suddenly lit the night sky to the north and antiaircraft guns boomed. The target was an Allied convoy steaming just offshore the Libyan coast, and the antiaircraft guns were aboard the ships. The attack ended, the flares faded, and silence settled over the 93rd’s desert camp.
January 9 marked another day of soothing sunshine. The wind kicked up a bit, but nothing like the previous week. In addition to his duties as flight surgeon, Doc Paine had become the 93rd’s expert on the roving bands of Bedouins, and he had made a game of sorts out of negotiating bigger and better transactions with the locals. He headed off into the desert in a jeep with tins of tea and eight pounds of sugar he had finagled from 93rd mess sergeants for several boxes of cigarettes. In his biggest deal to date, Paine returned to camp with two dozen eggs for him and his tentmate and invited guests. While the enlisted men dined on C-rations, Paine and Ken Cool whipped up a lunchtime spread of scrambled eggs, hash, fried sweet potatoes, and canned peaches, washed down with canned tomato juice and coffee.
After two weeks of close-quarters living in the desert camp, sanitary conditions had deteriorated. There were no latrines or privies, so the men performed their excretory functions by digging a hole and covering it with sand when they finished. This became a problem when the relentless winds began to uncover some of the holes. An army medical inspector visited the 93rd camp on the afternoon of January 9 and was appalled by the filthy conditions, including “crapping paper being blown all over [the] camp,” Doc Paine recorded in his diary. Plans were made to construct latrines before an outbreak of dysentery or other illnesses.
A mission to Bizerte was briefed during the daylight hours of January 9, but it was canceled before takeoff because of weather in the target area.
In the month since their arrival in North Africa, Ted Timberlake’s crews had flown nine missions. They had lost eighteen men in their first week, including fourteen in the crash involving Ox Johnson and his crew. Since the December 13 raid on Bizerte, the 93rd had gone twenty-seven days without any deaths or serious injuries. Most of the raids were carried out in darkness, exploiting the dearth of enemy night fighters in North Africa and Italy. The raids were far longer than what the 93rd crews had experienced flying out of Alconbury, but enemy resistance seemed markedly weaker.
Ben’s initial shock after his first raid on December 13, marked by the traumas of experiencing an antiaircraft barrage and witnessing the wounding of a comrade for the first time, had caused him to doubt whether he would live to see ten missions. Now, with six missions to his credit and four weeks without a casualty, Ben’s odds of survival had seemingly improved. But a tragic ten-day stretch ahead shattered that thinking and impressed upon Ben and his comrades the grim reality of their situation: Death would be a constant and capricious companion any time they took off for a mission.
Chapter 17
BIG DEALER
Around midmorning on January 10, 1943, a 93rd Bomb Group B-24 rumbled down the Gambut Main runway in a stiff breeze and climbed into a sunny winter sky. At the controls was a big, bearlike man, twenty-eight-year-old Major William Barksdale Musselwhite.
A former starting tackle on the Mississippi State College football team at Starkville, the easygoing native of Jackson, Mississippi, had written his name in the history books the previous August by piloting one of a dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses on the first Eighth Air Force raid of the war. In fact, Musselwhite’s Peggy D had dropped the first Eighth Air Force bomb of the daylight campaign against a German target. Newspapers across America had published photos of the brawny Musselwhite with his crew both before and after the raid on Rouen, France. Later in the fall, Musselwhite had been transferred to the 93rd Bomb Group’s 409th Squadron to fly B-24 Liberators. He was leading today’s raid.
One of the pilots that formed up on Musselwhite’s lead in the clear skies over the eastern Sahara was Jake Epting. While Epting and Hap Kendall guided Red Ass into its assigned spot in the formation, Ben chatted with his fellow gunners in the back until it was time to climb into his tail turret for another day at work.
Their target was a key link in the Axis supply pipeline in Tunisia: La Goulette, the portside complex of warehouses and docks built on a sandbar that separated the brackish Lake Tunis from the Mediterranean gulf. The weather forecast for the target area wasn’t good, but General Brereton had stressed the need to keep the pressure on. Sketchy weather or not, the B-24s would take a shot at crippling the taproot of the Axis armies in North Africa.
It was nearly nine hundred miles to the target, a distance Musselwhite and the other 93rd bombers covered in about five hours, most of which was spent over the Mediterranean. Approaching Tunis from the sea, the pilots found the weather better than feared. The bombers began their final sprint to the target.
In the late afternoon light, the B-24s toggled their bombs on the bustling port facilities of La Goulette. In less than ten minutes, Musselwhite and his raiders were in and out of the target area, and the crews settled in for the long flight back to Gambut Main.
With night falling and the risk of a midair collision rising, Musselwhite gave the order for the bombers to transition from an attack formation to a staggered file of solo flights. Every bomber was now on its own.
BACK AT THE GAMBUT CAMP, DOC PAINE had kept several of the enlisted men who weren’t flying today busy on a project triggered by the previous day’s health inspection. Their mission was to install a barrel-latrine system. Under Paine’s supervision, the men cut both ends out of several oil drums, buried two-thirds of each in the sand, and covered each with a wooden lid. The work was done by lunch.
The hours passed slowly when the men were away on a mission, and such was the case for Paine on this day. After lunch and a nap, he read for an hour or two, choosing a selection from the Jeeves series penned by English novelist P. G. Wodehouse. Around four, Paine checked out a jeep and drove to a nearby RAF medical reception station to chat with his British counterparts. He returned to the Gambut camp in time for dinner, and then spent the early evening waiting for word that the bombers were nearing the field.
Around nine o’clock, the lead 93rd aircraft alerted the Gambut Main tower of their approach. At 9:06 p.m., Paine headed to the control tower with his tentmate Ken Cool to watch the bombers land.1
ONE OF THE LA GOULETTE RAIDERS WINGING eastward through the evening of January 10 was a 330th Squadron Liberator named Big Dealer. The pilot was a twenty-three-year-old first lieutenant named Owen Kunze, one of the 93rd’s rising stars.
A wiry six-footer with a genial demeanor, blue eyes, and brown hair, Kunze grew up on a farm in east-central South Dakota, about 250 miles north of Ben’s Nebraska home. The area was known for farming and pheasant hunting. Farm families grew corn and other grains and raised hogs and cattle, both dairy and beef. Kunze was the youngest of four children born to George and Maude Kunze, and his grandparents on both sides of the family were immigrants—from Germany on his father’s side and England on his mother’s.
Young Owen distinguished himself as a schoolboy in spelling bees, essay-writing contests, Boy Scouts, and sports. He hunted pheasants and ducks in the fall, fished in the summer, and played baseball and basketball in season. After high school in the small town of Alpena, Kunze entered the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City. He studied to be a mining engineer while playing guard and forward on the school’s Hardrockers basketball team. In mid-September 1940, the same week the first peacetime draft in American history got underway, Kunze was one of ten students selected for the third flight-training class conducted by the School of Mines. Kunze successfully completed the course in early December 1940 and earned his civilian pilot’s license in early January. Seven months later, on July 20, 1941, after two years of college, Kunze entered the Army Air Forces.
On the day he reported for his Army physical that summer of 1941, Kunze met two other aspiring military pilots, Iowans John “Packy” Roche and Robert “Shine” Shannon. The three passed their army physicals and became inseparable over the ensuing months of pilot’s training. All three earned their wings in early 1942 and were assigned to Ted Timberlake’s fledgling B-24 group at Barksdale Field that spring. Their close friendship, prowess as pilots, and penchant for practical jokes earned them a mock-serious sobriquet. They became known as the 93rd’s “Terrible Three.”2
Kunze wore his officer’s peaked cap at a jaunty angle, and he brought a reassuring can-do style to his command of the Big Dealer crew. He was one of twenty 93rd pilots who had flown the October 9, 1942, debut raid on Lille, and two of Kunze’s gunners were credited with shooting down enemy fighters on the mission. Recounting how Big Dealer got shot up over enemy territory without any of his crew suffering so much as a scratch, Kunze quipped to a news correspondent, “I think we must have had a rabbit[’s] foot along.”3
Kunze again caught the attention of American war correspondents a few weeks later after tangling with German fighters on an anti-submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay. In a shoot-out with three twin-engine Messerschmitt Me-110 fighters on the November 9 patrol, Kunze’s men shot down two enemy aircraft and drove off the third.4
Fortune continued to favor Kunze and his crew in North Africa. On the 93rd’s first mission, the December 13 raid on Bizerte, Big Dealer had taken multiple hits from enemy fire without any injuries, and Kunze and his copilot, Lieutenant John “Babe” Emmons, another Iowan, had safely landed the aircraft. Kunze had mentioned the incident in a letter that had just reached his parents in South Dakota in early January. “A funny thing happened the other day. ‘Big Dealer’ was fairly well riddled and looked like a sieve but is all repaired and ready to go again. Believe me, Jerry is really going to pay for that. Tell [cousin] Kenneth that I dropped a bomb with his name on it. Not only that, it hit smack on the target too.”5
Now Kunze and his Big Dealer crew were among the broken line of 93rd B-24s closing on Gambut Main in the darkness. Between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., eleven Liberators landed safely and taxied to their assigned parking spots. As silence settled over the blacked-out field, a quick check revealed one missing aircraft: Big Dealer.
Several men waited at the field, straining to hear the sound of approaching aircraft engines. But there was only silence. Doc Paine and Ken Cool finally left the control tower and returned to their tent. They stayed up reading and hoping to hear good news about Big Dealer, but finally gave up at midnight and extinguished their oil lamps.
The rest of the 93rd camp awoke on January 11 to the disconcerting news that Owen Kunze and his crew hadn’t made it back. Throughout that day and the next, word of Big Dealer’s fate trickled in. Her navigator had erred in his calculations and Kunze missed Gambut Main in the darkness. Flying over the desert of central Egypt, about one hundred miles southeast of Gambut Main, Big Dealer neared the point of fuel exhaustion. Kunze ordered his men to abandon ship. Five of them, including copilot Babe Emmons, parachuted to safety. Kunze remained at the controls to the end, and when his final engine quit, he attempted a dead-stick belly-landing east of Bir el Khamsa, Egypt. Big Dealer broke apart on impact and exploded in flames. The bodies of Owen Kunze and three men who had stayed with the ship for reasons unknown were pulled from the wreckage.6
THE LOSS OF THE INDEFATIGABLE OWEN KUNZE and three of his men sent shock waves through the 93rd, but their comrades kept flying. Four of Kunze’s closest friends, including Packy Roche, were so upset that Doc Paine gave them a sedative so they could get some sleep. With the losses mounting and the 93rd now down to nineteen battle-fit aircraft, there would be fewer days off for the remaining bombers and crews.
Midday of January 13 found Ben in the rear compartment of Red Ass with his fellow gunners as Jake Epting and Hap Kendall coaxed their B-24 into the sky and into the formation of a dozen Liberators heading east to bomb the port of Tunis. Still coping with the loss of his friend, Packy Roche was assigned to fly as copilot with the mission leader, Ramsay Potts, a basketball and tennis star at the University of North Carolina who had grown up in Memphis, Tennessee. The weather over Tunis was bad so Potts diverted the formation down the Tunisian coast to their alternate target, the port of Sousse. Bombs were dropped and the pilots and navigators began the long nighttime flight back to Gambut Main—acutely aware of the consequences of even the simplest navigational error.
