The men of the 93rd were also showing the effects. They had learned to live on little water and monotonously bland C-rations, and their uniforms, flying gear, and shoes were falling apart.6 The men had learned to supplement their diet by bartering with the locals for tangerines, lemons, oranges, and fresh eggs, but with those transactions came exposure to illnesses that were endemic in the Bedouin encampments and local villages.
With the passage of time, some of the men had become dangerously inured to the fact that they were living in the middle of a vast battlefield littered with unexploded ordnance and other hazards. Some bored airmen invented games with captured German ordnance by repurposing the explosives from antiaircraft shells for use in improvised fireworks displays.7 Around eleven in the morning on February 13, Doc Paine was in his tent reading a British spy novel when an explosion jolted him from his cot. He heard shouts and screams and emerged to witness a horrifying scene. Afterward, Paine distilled the mishap in a caustic diary entry: “Six dumb guys put an 88mm shell in a hole and threw rocks in on top to set it off and blow the hole deep enough for a latrine. It did. We hauled 4 to [a nearby] hospital in [an] ambulance. One lost his left eye and several were in foul shape from flak wounds.”8
AMID THE FRUSTRATING UNCERTAINTY about the group’s rumored return to England, the men mounted another mission on Monday, February 15. The target was Naples. It was the 93rd’s first mission in five days, and only the fourth of the month. Twelve crews were briefed at 10:00 a.m. and took off at 12:15 p.m. They were joined by nine B-24s of the 376th. Flying in formation, the two groups wheeled to the north for the Mediterranean crossing.
Problems arose soon after takeoff. Six of the twenty-one aircraft—two from the 93rd and four from the 376th—turned back with mechanical problems. The remaining bombers arrived over Naples at dusk, and were greeted by heavy flak and twelve to fifteen enemy fighters.
In the darkness and chaotic interplay of American bombers and German fighters, a 93rd B-24 named Cephalopod disappeared. Piloting the aircraft was a twenty-two-year-old Oklahoman, Lieutenant Charles T. Moore, affectionately known to his friends and fellow officers as Chub. When the last of the American bombers landed at Gambut Main around 11:00 p.m., Moore’s crew wasn’t among them. “He failed to return, but we hope he is in at Malta,” Doc Paine wrote after returning from the airfield.9
Overnight a radio message from Malta arrived: Charley Moore wasn’t there. The mood among the 93rd officers was already grim over Chub Moore’s disappearance when Ted Timberlake arrived from Cairo at noon with the latest from Ninth Air Force headquarters on the group’s fate. There were still “no orders to return us to England due to brass hats being void between the ears,” as Doc Paine paraphrased Timberlake’s report.10
Heartbroken over Chub Moore’s disappearance and incensed by headquarters indecision over the 93rd’s status, Doc Paine, Ken Cool, and Packy Roche tried to drown their sorrows in a bottle of Canadian Club whisky. Late in the afternoon, in what seemed like a feeble attempt to bolster 93rd morale, Pat Timberlake flew in to present medals to about thirty men. Doc Paine and Ken Cool were fed up. Each took a sedative from Paine’s dispensary and collapsed onto their cots at 7:30 p.m. for a long night’s sleep.
As the dispiriting week wore on, hopes for the return of Chub Moore and his men faded. “The general morale is at a low ebb due chiefly to the fact that no one knows what the score is,” Doc Paine groused. “Col. Ted has made no statement and all the men get is via damn rumor—which is bad.”11
At 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 18, the 93rd men made their way to the 376th encampment for another medal ceremony, this one presided over by General Brereton. Ken Cool and Packy Roche, among others, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, but the men couldn’t help but think about Chub Moore and his missing crew. Only a few days earlier, Moore had stood at attention at one of these ceremonies as he was decorated with an Oak Leaf Cluster added to his previous Air Medal. Standing to Moore’s left had been the pilot George Piburn. Now, Moore was dead, along with his entire crew—shot down near the target, the 93rd men would later learn—and Piburn was an emotional wreck who would never fly another combat mission.12
Afterward, Doc Paine overheard one of Brereton’s aides tell Timberlake that he was carrying orders that would send the 93rd back to England after one final mission. It was finally happening.
Thrilled by the news, Doc Paine joined the group’s pickup baseball game after lunch and for two hours ran around the field like a teenager rather than a slightly paunchy thirty-eight-year-old gentleman on the precipice of middle age. Still fired up that evening, he drank and sang into the wee hours. He would awaken in the morning with aching muscles, strained vocal cords, and a pounding head, yet still overjoyed at the knowledge that the 93rd’s time in this godforsaken station was coming to an end. No one in the 93rd would be happier to bid farewell to the desert than the gentleman doctor from Virginia.
BY MID-FEBRUARY, THE GROUND WAR in North Africa was centered in the rugged hills and valleys of central Tunisia. In January, the Americans and British had pushed eastward through the Grand Dorsal system of the Atlas Mountains, establishing a line that was only about sixty miles from Tunisia’s east coast in places. Faced with the threat of the Allies splitting his Tunisian bridgehead in half, Field Marshal Rommel attacked in early February. By the middle of the month, Rommel was poised to unleash the next phase of his long-shot attempt to conjure a victory over the Allies in Tunisia.
General von Arnim’s forces dislodged elements of the US 1st Armored Division in attacks that began February 14, and Rommel followed with attacks of his own that drove American troops back to the Western Dorsal, one of two roughly parallel mountain ranges that dominated the topography of central Tunisia. On February 19, Rommel and von Arnim combined their forces in an attempt to cripple the Americans at Kasserine Pass.
In the initial stages of the battle, the Americans retreated in disarray, falling back as far as fifty miles in places. Finally, on February 22, troops of the US Army’s II Corps, supplemented by British reinforcements, halted the German advance. Battered by heavy artillery and air attacks, Rommel abruptly ended the offensive. By February 24, after more US air strikes, Allied troops had reclaimed Kasserine Pass and regained the momentum in Tunisia.13
As the battle in the Kasserine Pass raged, weather grounded the 93rd crews. On Friday, February 19, the crews were briefed to bomb Naples, but the mission was canceled before takeoff because of poor weather in the target area. After lunch, the group ordnance officer was “tinkering with a M103 bomb fuse” when it exploded in his face, injuring his fingers and sending a steel splinter into his right eyeball.
The crews were briefed again and cleared for takeoff on Saturday, February 20. Their target again was Naples. En route to Italy, the crews received orders to turn east to their alternate target and dropped their bombs on a chemical factory in Crotone, along southern Italy’s Calabrian coast. It was another long mission—nine hours and thirty-five minutes for the Epting crew—but, most important of all, the 93rd returned with all its crews and without a single casualty. Ben would be returning to England with fourteen missions to his credit.
As Ben and his comrades celebrated their final mission in North Africa, American forces were fleeing westward from Kasserine Pass. Unknown to the men of the 93rd, their fate was tied to that of the retreating American ground forces. If the Axis forces continued to advance, the 93rd would have to remain in North Africa to help swing the tide of battle. But the crisis passed when Rommel withdrew his forces from Kasserine Pass. With the situation in Tunisia under control once more, generals Eisenhower and Spaatz released the 93rd from its temporary duty in North Africa. Orders were cut for Ted Timberlake and his men to return to England.
At one o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1943, Ken Cool guided Hot Freight down the Gambut Main runway for the final time and led the first flight of five 93rd bombers into the night sky. Doc Paine was among the passengers joining Cool on the flight. Their destination was Tafaraoui, Algeria, outside Oran, the soggy spot where the 93rd had briefly stopped before inclement weather drove them into the Libyan desert.
In the hour after Cool led his flight of B-24s away from Gambut Main, Jake Epting coaxed Red Ass into the sky for the first leg of the journey back to England. Nothing about Ben Kuroki’s military career had come easily, and so it would be with what was supposed to be a routine transit flight. As the long and harrowing night unfolded, Ben and his brothers-in-arms would wonder whether they would ever see another dawn.
Chapter 21
MISSING IN ACTION
Heading away from Gambut Main, Jake Epting joined the long train of B-24s tracking westward across North Africa on an all-night flight. Their briefing called for a refueling stop at Tafaraoui and then the final leg home. If everything went according to plan, Ben and his crewmates would take their breakfast in Algeria and dinner in England.
But nothing about the journey went according to plan.
At the head of the column, Hot Freight ran into overcast soon after takeoff. When celestial navigation became impossible, pilot Ken Cool switched to instruments. Dawn revealed zero-visibility flying conditions, and by the time the bombers neared Tafaraoui clouds and fog obscured the ground. Ted Timberlake radioed the trailing aircraft to reduce altitude and search for a hole in the clouds, but the only openings were too small or too fleeting to risk entering.
Cool caught a glimpse of the airfield, but before he could get his landing gear down the fog sealed the opening. He tried to wait out the weather, but after ninety minutes of circling the area, visibility was even worse. Critically low on fuel, Cool landed Hot Freight at an airstrip forty miles east of Tafaraoui.
In the pilot’s seat of Teggie Ann, Colonel Timberlake feared that his entire force might exhaust their fuel and fall from the sky. Timberlake saw two options: They could gamble on better weather at Gibraltar or roll the dice on the fog lifting over Tafaraoui. Either way, they were going to be cutting it close. The pilots switched to low power settings to conserve fuel, and some tried to reduce their fuel consumption by lightening their load. Timberlake had his men toss out some of their heaviest nonessential items, including their waist guns and a stash of fresh eggs bartered from Bedouins. Timberlake glimpsed flashes of runway through the fog, but deemed it too risky to attempt a landing without a beacon to guide his ships. Some pilots dropped down to as low as fifty feet in their desperate search for the runway.1
One Liberator had already lost an engine to fuel exhaustion when the ragged holes in the fog revealed enough runway to attempt a landing. Another of Timberlake’s pilots spotted the smoke from a locomotive and asked the Tafaraoui control tower for a heading from the train to the runway. Emerging from the fog at treetop level, the pilot guided the B-24 to a safe landing, barely avoiding a collision with a Liberator approaching from the other direction.
Several courageous C-47 pilots from a nearby field heard the appeals from Timberlake’s men and climbed into the clouds to search for the lost Liberators. The selfless transport pilots found the Liberators and led them back to their field. Miraculously, thirteen bombers landed safely at Tafaraoui and nearby fields—some with less than five minutes of fuel in their tanks.
Safely on the ground, Ted Timberlake pieced together a status report on his boys. One 93rd aircraft was missing: Jake Epting’s Red Ass.
THE DIMINUTIVE EPTING AND LANKY Hap Kendall had guided their battle-scarred B-24 into the night sky above Libya with four passengers joining the crew for the ride home. The intelligence briefing had suggested the 93rd Liberators faced an uneventful first leg. Luftwaffe air capabilities in North Africa had been decimated by nearly three years of nonstop combat, and the remaining Axis fighters in the area were limited to airfields in northern Tunisia and nearby Sicily. Given the remote odds of encountering enemy night fighters on their flight to Algeria, most of the crew and passengers curled up in the back to catch some sleep. Some four hours into the flight, Epting and Kendall entered Tunisian airspace. The pilots alerted Ben and the other gunners to be on the lookout for prowling enemy fighters, but there was no sign of the Luftwaffe in the hour it took to cross Tunisia.
They were home free—or so it seemed.
Dawn was approaching, but the farther west the Liberators flew the worse visibility became. Sitting in his Plexiglas-encased nose compartment, navigator Edward Weir had been unable to use celestial navigation for hours. With the moon and stars obscured, Weir attempted dead-reckoning navigation techniques, an imprecise method using the last-known location as a baseline and factoring in airspeed, wind, and estimated drift to calculate the current location. It soon became clear to Epting and Kendall that their navigator didn’t have a clue where they were.
Epting eased the bomber down through the clouds in search of clear skies, but none were to be found. Ben’s friend Red Kettering checked various radio frequencies, trying to get a fix on the Tafaraoui airfield, without success. Epting found the coastline, but he couldn’t find the airfield in the fog. He weighed whether to attempt a landing in the water or on a beach, or whether to press on. The debate took on even greater urgency as their fuel gauges dipped into the red. What was supposed to be a routine flight had suddenly become a life-and-death emergency.
The thought wasn’t lost on some of the men that the 93rd might end its seventy-nine-day Africa sojourn the same way it began: with the loss of fourteen men in a crash. It was the beloved Iowan Ox Johnson who had collided with a mountain while trying to find the Tafaraoui airfield in similar weather on December 13. Now Jake Epting and his crew and passengers were reliving that doomed flight. In the nose, navigator Edward Weir prepared to die. “We figured we were going to crash any minute,” Ben later recalled.2
Suddenly, Epting spotted a small hole in the clouds. He reacted instinctively, threading the B-24 down through the ragged portal. In the gray half-light beneath the fog, mountains loomed on three sides, but Epting spotted a sliver of flat terrain tucked into the hills. He lowered the landing gear and ordered the men to brace for a rough landing. A wheat field rushed up to meet them, and the wheels gently touched the stalks then found solid ground. Epting eased the bomber to a stop as perfectly as if the wheat field had been a paved runway.
They had overshot Oran by more than one hundred miles and had flown into the Atlas Mountains. The break in the clouds had led them to an improbable safe haven surrounded by hills and peaks that soared to seven thousand feet. Jake Epting’s stellar flying had saved Ben and his comrades—but not for long.
