For the men who had the day off or officers assigned to ground duties, the routine around the desert camp had become drearily familiar. After a long day marked by the conspicuous absence of so many comrades, they would head out to the airfield around 9:00 p.m. to await the return of the bombers. The question on everyone’s mind was whether tragedy had once again struck their close-knit group. On this night, Doc Paine was given the honor of firing the flares to guide the bombers to the darkened LG 139 on their final approach. When the parade of returning bombers ended and the tally was taken, once again it was discovered that one bomber was missing. Timberlake and several other officers waited at the airfield until midnight before returning to camp to await further news. After another anxious night, the morning of January 14 brought good news: The missing 93rd crew had made an emergency landing on the British island fortress of Malta, and all were safe.
For Doc Paine, the good news was tempered by the solemn duties that awaited him in his role as the 93rd’s chief medical officer. The previous day he had filled out casualty reports on Owen Kunze and sergeants James Anderson, Byron W. Smith, and Robert E. Woody. Now Paine boarded a B-24 flown by a pilot who was taking a break from combat duties because of his deteriorating mental health. They took off and headed east to Egypt, where Paine was to represent the 93rd at the funeral services for Owen Kunze and his three men.
Before burying the four, Paine carried out the gruesome task of identifying the remains of each man. At graveside services in the British military cemetery at Mersa Matruh, he read the opening verses of the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”7
At the conclusion of the service, Paine tossed dirt onto the coffins of Owen Kunze and his three men. Back at the 93rd’s desert camp later that afternoon, Paine tried to drown his sorrow in a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky.
Chapter 18
DOUBLE TROUBLE
Friday, January 15, brought more bad news, and this time the anguish was centered in Ben’s 409th Squadron. Twelve 93rd crews were dispatched to bomb Tripoli, Field Marshal Rommel’s final Libyan stronghold. The Liberators encountered heavy flak and a handful of fighters in the target area. The 409th Squadron bomber Flying Cock, commanded by First Lieutenant Lew Brown, had dropped its bombs and was nearly clear of the target area when it took a direct hit. The number three engine burst into flames. Brown tried to feather the prop on the burning engine but the mechanism wouldn’t work. Brown alerted his men to be ready for an abandon-ship order.
Four gunners in the rear of Flying Cock either misunderstand the warning or decided the ship was doomed and didn’t see the point in waiting for Brown to tell them as much. Two of the men helped wounded comrades snap on their chest parachutes and pushed them out of one of the waist windows, then followed. Flying Cock was flying over the Mediterranean at fourteen thousand feet, about thirty miles south of Tripoli, when the four men left the aircraft.
In the cockpit, Brown and copilot Robert Quinlivan battled to save Flying Cock. With one engine afire and enemy fighters attacking, the two of them managed a rapid descent to six thousand feet. Suddenly, the engine fire went out and the crisis eased. The last the other crews saw, Brown was flying under control and headed eastward into the night.
After another long night at the desert camp, the 93rd men once again awakened to good news: Brown had somehow managed to land Flying Cock at an airfield on the outskirts of the Libyan city of Benghazi. But the rest of the story was painful: The four Flying Cock crew members who bailed out over the Mediterranean were missing. Doc Paine said a prayer for the men as he recorded their plight in his diary: “No report of the 4 poor devils who bailed out over enemy waters.” The four missing airmen—sergeants Ernest J. Kish, Arthur Batson, Harold M. Sena, and Charles O. Starcher—were never found. Batson was a ground crewman who had volunteered to fly with Brown as a replacement gunner for that one raid.1
THE GROUP WAS LOSING MEN AND PLANES at an accelerating pace, but the demands of higher authorities took precedence. On January 19, after a single day’s respite, Timberlake’s dwindling force—Ben and the Epting crew included—was back in action. Their target for the second time in a week was the port of Sousse. German hopes for victory in North Africa hinged on keeping the Tunisian ports open, and so they had continued to bolster antiaircraft defenses. That much was clear to the men of the 93rd, who were on the receiving end of the enemy flak.
The 93rd’s lead aircraft for the mission was a 328th Squadron bomber named Shoot Luke, and the crew members found themselves fighting for their lives over the target. An enemy shell smashed into the nose compartment, passing between the heads of Shoot Luke’s navigator and bombardier. Fighters swooped in and the crew’s top turret gunner was hit in both ankles and knocked from his perch. Ignoring his injuries, Sergeant Arvle D. Sirmans of Shreveport, Louisiana, climbed back into his turret and resumed fire against the enemy fighters. Sirmans would receive the Silver Star valor award for his actions.
It was the nineteenth birthday of the crew’s radio operator, Sergeant William Mercer of Zanesville, Ohio, and he went down with a serious thigh wound. Pilot John Murphy threaded the gauntlet of enemy fire and landed his mangled aircraft at Malta with two good engines and a fire crackling in one of his wings. The crew counted six hundred holes in their aircraft; Shoot Luke would be back in action in two weeks’ time.2
The B-24 Double Trouble, piloted by Captain Benjamin Riggs, wasn’t as fortunate. Enemy antiaircraft fire knocked out the two port-side engines and Double Trouble fell into a flat spin. The radio operator of a nearby ship, Jerk’s Natural, counted six parachutes as Double Trouble descended in its death spiral. Two of the four men who managed to bail out were plucked unconscious from the Mediterranean by local fishermen. The fishermen handed them over to the Germans, and the two men ended up in a prisoner of war camp.3 Riggs and seven other crew members joined the growing list of 93rd men killed in action.
ON JANUARY 21, 1943, BEN COMPLETED his tenth mission with the Epting crew. Their target was Tripoli, the Libyan city that had served as Rommel’s main supply base during the early stages of his retreat. The raid helped pave the way for one of the greatest Allied triumphs of the war to that point when British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army claimed Tripoli for the Allies two days later. For Montgomery and his seasoned army, the triumph marked the culmination of a fourteen-hundred-mile advance following their spectacular defeat of Rommel at the second battle of El Alamein three months earlier.4
Ben and his 93rd comrades had played an integral role in the rising Allied fortunes in North Africa in the first weeks of 1943, but it had come at a dear cost. Thirty-four comrades had died or were lost forever in six weeks of raids, on what was supposed to have been a ten-day temporary assignment. Now, orders were being drawn up for the 93rd to begin a new phase of what was becoming increasingly deadly duty.
Chapter 19
NO END IN SIGHT
The capture of Tripoli on January 23 took a prime target off the table for Hap Arnold’s heavy bombers in North Africa. General Doolittle’s Algeria-based B-17s now assumed primary responsibility for bombing the Tunisian ports of Tunis, Bizerte, Sfax, and Sousse, while the desert-based B-24s turned their sights on a set of crucial targets in southern Italy.
In the supply chain that now sustained Axis forces in North Africa, three Italian ports had emerged as chokepoints: Naples, 110 miles south of Rome and the primary port of origin for Axis supply ships destined for Tunisia; Messina, the terminus for six specially constructed ferry vessels that transported railcars from Reggio di Calabria and San Giovanni on the Italian mainland to the island of Sicily; and the Sicilian port of Palermo, which, as a result of the massive train-ferries arriving on the island via Messina, had emerged as an even closer point of origin for Axis transports attempting the increasingly perilous run to Tunisia.1
Severing these links in the enemy lifeline became the objective of Ben and his comrades.
As had so often been the case in the 93rd’s five months of fitful combat, weather complicated the well-laid plans. Missions scheduled for January 24 and 25 were scrubbed by rainy weather that enveloped much of the eastern Mediterranean region. After two days of delays, the 93rd crews got airborne around midday on January 26. Their target was the Naples port area, which was bustling with transports bound for Axis forces in Tunisia.
The Red Ass crew earned the honor of leading twelve 93rd aircraft to the target, but with one notable change: Colonel Keith K. Compton, the 93rd’s operations officer, occupied the pilot’s seat. A strapping twenty-seven-year-old from St. Joseph, Missouri, Compton had joined the Army Air Corps after graduating from Westminster College in 1938, and was now one of the 93rd’s most experienced pilots. He had originally joined the group in Louisiana as the 409th Squadron commander, and he had quickly risen to become Timberlake’s trusted operations officer at 93rd headquarters. With Compton in the left seat, Jake Epting took the copilot’s seat.
After crossing the Mediterranean and heading up Italy’s west coast, the bombers arrived at Naples to find the port area obscured by darkness. Rather than bomb blindly, Compton turned the 93rd force south to Sicily. Messina was the alternate target, and visibility over the busy Sicilian port was good enough for bombing. It also was good enough for enemy gunners on the ground to pepper the 93rd Liberators with bursts of flak. Al Naum locked his bombsight on the distinctive curved building that housed the massive machinery where train cars were lowered onto rails as they arrived from the mainland on the customized ferries. With the push of a button, Naum released five 1,000-pound bombs on the Messina harbor area.2
With Compton leading the way, the dozen 93rd bombers set a southeasterly course, dissolved their formation, and proceeded individually across the moonlit Mediterranean. At 9:45 p.m., the 330th Squadron leader, Ken Cool, awakened his tentmate, Doc Paine, to let him know that K. K. Compton and the boys were preparing to land. By the time that Red Ass rolled to a stop, the crew had been airborne for nine hours. Ben had survived his eleventh mission.
The B-24s perfected a routine to keep the enemy guessing as they replicated their attacks on the three Italian ports. The Liberators would take off from Gambut in the late morning or early afternoon, assemble over the desert, then angle northwest over the Libyan coast to begin the Mediterranean crossing. The bombers would obscure their intentions as long as possible, making landfall on the sole of the Italian boot, in the vicinity of Catanzaro, a blind spot in enemy radar coverage. They would continue on a westerly vector to a point over the Tyrrhenian Sea, off Italy’s west coast, that was equidistant from the three targets. Only then would the bombers home in on their destination. The B-24s took other precautions, such as bombing at last light and then sprinting seaward, a tactic adopted after crews observed that enemy fighters “were noticeably less aggressive over the water.”3 In the gathering twilight, the bomber formations would dissolve and the B-24s would undertake the long flight home in solitude.
The tragedy that culminated with the deaths of four members of the crew of Big Dealer earlier in January had underscored the perils of a nighttime return to the darkened desert airstrips, particularly with the Germans intent on blocking radio transmissions. The shoreline was rarely visible to the returning bombers, and the Gambut runways were marked by only a single row of lights and a low-frequency radio beacon with a range of only a few miles.4
The B-24 raids on Naples, Messina, and Palermo were an integral piece in the unfolding Allied plan to defeat the last stand in Tunisia by the combined Axis forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim. Far removed from the strategic debates of the commanding generals, Ben and his comrades derived a special satisfaction from their raids on the Italian ports. They were taking the war to the Axis homeland.
THE NEWS OF TRIPOLI’S CAPTURE BY British forces dominated newspaper front pages across America on Sunday, January 24, with banner headlines like the one in western Nebraska’s Scottsbluff Star-Herald: “Tripoli Falls to British, Rommel Speeds Up Dash in Tunisia.” Many newspapers also ran another story on their front page that Sunday—a London-datelined scoop by Joe Alex Morris, the United Press foreign editor. Military censors had cut seventeen words from the opening paragraphs, but enough remained to hint at a major development brewing in Allied circles. “Transatlantic negotiations between Britain and the United States tonight were expected to result in imminent announcement of important decisions,” the dispatch began.
In fact, by the time many Americans read their Sunday papers, twenty-seven reporters and about two dozen photographers were pounding out stories from an extraordinary joint press conference conducted by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Casablanca, French Morocco. Roosevelt explained to the astonished reporters that the Allies had just completed a war conference “unprecedented in history.” Although the details would have to remain secret, Roosevelt told the reporters, there was one takeaway he wanted the reporters to convey to the Axis powers and the world.5
“I think we have all had it in our hearts and heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the prime minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power,” Roosevelt began. And that could only happen if Germany, Italy, and Japan were forced to surrender unconditionally to the Allies. “It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and subjugation of other people,” Roosevelt added. And then, in a comment calculated to shape news coverage of the event, Roosevelt suggested that the reporters might want to call the conference the “unconditional surrender meeting.”6 Churchill concurred, and the reporters obliged with one hundred thousand words collectively filed from Casablanca in the hours that followed.
Although Churchill and Roosevelt couldn’t reveal it publicly, the Casablanca Conference had produced two important strategic decisions: The cross-channel invasion of France advocated by the Americans had been pushed beyond 1943 in favor of the British Mediterranean strategy aimed at knocking Italy from the war; and the American heavy bombers based in England would continue their daylight campaign against Nazi Germany rather than join the RAF nighttime raids, as Churchill had suggested at the outset of the conference.
Upon learning of Churchill’s desire to end the American daylight bombing campaign, Hap Arnold had personally lobbied the British prime minister at Casablanca. He had also urgently summoned his Eighth Air Force commander, General Ira Eaker, from England to make the case to Churchill. Having earned a reprieve for the daylight campaign, Arnold and his small traveling party had slipped away from Casablanca in an Army Air Forces B-17.
After a day of discussions with his senior air chiefs in North Africa, Arnold devoted Monday, January 25 to a whirlwind tour of American air outfits in northwest Africa. He listened in thrall to stories about combat heroics and the miraculous escapes of men who had been shot down over the desert or over water. As his aircraft approached Biskra, his last stop in Algeria before heading to Egypt, Arnold experienced one of the sandstorms that was bedeviling Allied air operations across North Africa and the Middle East.
Later that evening, Arnold’s flight across North Africa in a B-17 gave him another taste of the challenging winter weather. Arnold shared the 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. watch with one of his fellow passengers while two senior aides slept. When he finished his watch, Arnold curled up in a sleeping bag “with a strong draft blowing on my head from the opening around the ball turret.” He awoke several hours later “with the sun shining on my face” as his aircraft prepared to land at Cairo.7
ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, AFTER a day of briefings and discussions with British and American commanders in Cairo, Arnold flew 380 miles to the west, to Tobruk, Libya. He was driven forty miles into the desert to Gambut Main to have lunch and a chat with the astonished men of the 93rd Bomb Group.
