Lovett had been lured to the War Department in 1940 as a high-level troubleshooter and a minder of sorts to keep the volatile Hap Arnold out of trouble. A polished and charming patrician, Lovett was masterful at his work. By the spring of 1943, he was intimately familiar with Arnold’s foibles, and one blind spot in particular: Arnold’s stubborn belief that American B-17 and B-24 bombers could attack Nazi Germany without long-range escorts.
As Lovett gathered information from bomber crews and air commanders, Arnold was recuperating from his second heart attack since visiting with the men of the 93rd at Gambut Main in February. He had spent most of May resting and fishing in the Pacific Northwest. He had missed the ten-day TRIDENT war conference in Washington, DC, during which major decisions had been made about the summer priorities for the air campaign against Germany.
On his return to Washington on May 27, Arnold was briefed on all that had transpired in his absence. The news of a more productive month by Eaker’s bombers was encouraging, but the rising losses from German fighter attacks were a concern. Robert Lovett was due back in Washington in early June, and Arnold expected to learn much more about the state of affairs with the Eighth Air Force. Lovett had yet to put his thoughts to paper, but by the end of May, Hap Arnold’s troubleshooter had heard enough to conclude that the young airmen he had met during his tour of bomber bases in East Anglia faced a grim reckoning in the months ahead.
Chapter 24
SPECIAL ORDERS NUMBER 174
As the month of June 1943 began, the 93rd crews waited anxiously each day for the alert that would signal their next combat mission. Days passed and the alert didn’t come. Instead, the crews began treetop-level practice flights over the East Anglian countryside. “Buzzing,” as the low-altitude flights were known to fliers, had been strictly forbidden during their stateside training. Now they were buzzing the English countryside under orders. They would take off from Hardwick, form up wingtip-to-wingtip with other aircraft, and then swoop back and forth over the farms and pastures. It was a strange turn of events that no one could explain.
Some of the men found the training exhilarating because of its previously forbidden nature. Others found it excruciating because of motion sickness, a malady exacerbated by the choppy air of low-altitude flight. The drills also irritated local farmers, who complained to the Americans about a litany of disruptions to their livelihoods: cows that suddenly wouldn’t produce milk, plow horses that became skittish, and bees that ceased to make honey.1
The odd low-level training was a welcome change of pace for those men who were battling homesickness and combat anxiety. One morose gunner seemed to take perverse pleasure in chronicling the misery of airsick comrades and frightened livestock. “Flew formation all afternoon. Guy got sick as hell,” the gunner wrote in one diary entry. “Buzzed everyone for miles,” read another. “Did some low-altitude bombing practice. Scared every cow and horse in England.” And, “More low-altitude bombing. Two guys got sick as hell.”2
Laughs aside, no one doubted that the unconventional training foreshadowed a mission of great importance—one that would likely claim at least some of their lives. Imaginations ran wild. Some of the men coined a name for the mystery mission: The Big One.
While B-17 groups in the area continued to fly combat missions, the 93rd focused solely on the low-level flights. Some of the 93rd old-timers like Ben missed their lives in Alconbury, with its proximity to Cambridge and London. But Hardwick had its bucolic charms, and, with its patchwork of farms, lanes, and villages, it reminded Ben of home.
On the morning of June 14, the crews were briefed for a mock mission that would be flown at treetop level. The men were assigned to aircraft, climbed into the sky, and staged a low-level “attack” on the Hardwick base. Renewed speculation swirled about the target that beckoned from some distant land: Germany? Russia? Norway? North Africa? Nobody knew for sure.
With each passing week, Ben and those members of the 93rd who had yet to finish their tours felt more alone than ever. Radio operator William L. Gros of the 328th Squadron finished his twenty-five missions with the raid on La Pallice, only days after his twentieth birthday, and then spent two weeks relaxing in a convalescent home with a wounded comrade. On his return to Hardwick in mid-June to train new radio operators for action, Gros and one of his few remaining friends in the group walked into the combat sergeants’ mess hall, looked around, and stopped dead in their tracks. They didn’t recognize a soul. The two 93rd veterans turned around and walked out. “We sat down on the steps of the mess hall and cried like babies,” Gros said. “I think it was the first time that either one of us ever stopped to think of what had happened to us and the guys we were with.”3
WHILE THE 93RD AND TWO OTHER B-24 groups practiced low-level flights for a secret mission yet to be revealed, Ira Eaker unleashed a flurry of June raids that he hoped would silence Hap Arnold’s sniping about Eighth Air Force inactivity. The American bombers were greeted by the most ferocious Luftwaffe fighter resistance yet encountered. During the period of June 11 to 22, Eaker lost fifty bombers to enemy fire and had another two-hundred-plus damaged.
It was against the backdrop of these losses that Robert Lovett on June 18 crafted a memo to Arnold that incorporated the conclusions of his recent fact-finding trip to England. There was an “immediate need for long range fighters,” Lovett wrote. “Fighter escort will have to be provided for B-17s on as many missions as possible in order particularly to get them through the first wave of the German fighter defense, which is now put up in depth so that the B-17s are forced to run the gauntlet both in to the target and out from it.”4
Three days passed without action by Arnold. On the fourth day, June 22, word of another costly raid arrived from England. More than 200 B-17s had been dispatched to hit the chemical works and synthetic rubber plant at Hüls, in the Ruhr Valley. Of 183 bombers that reached the target, 16 were shot down and 75 damaged. The day’s official casualty numbers for the Eighth Air Force were 2 killed in action, 16 wounded, and 151 missing.
At this rate, Eaker’s recent reinforcements would be wiped out by summer’s end.
On June 22, Arnold issued a terse directive to his trusted deputy, General Barney Giles. “Within this next six months, you have got to get a fighter to protect our bombers,” Arnold decreed. “Whether you use an existing type or have to start from scratch is your problem.”5
In the meantime, without the protection of long-range escorts, more than one thousand Eighth Air Force bomber boys would pay the ultimate price for Hap Arnold’s delay. Ben would be trying to finish his twenty-five missions during some of the darkest days of the American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.
ON THURSDAY, JUNE 24, THE 93RD’S carefree days of buzzing the English countryside ended abruptly. The men were ordered to assemble for an inspection. Soon, a staff car rolled through the gates at AAF 104, and the guest of honor emerged. It was General Jacob Devers, who, a few weeks earlier, had become commander of US forces in the European Theater of Operations, replacing Frank Andrews, killed in the crash of a 93rd aircraft that was ferrying him to Washington for important meetings. Devers congratulated the 93rd veterans for their work of the previous months and welcomed the new arrivals. He exhorted the crews to carry on under their new group commander, Addison Baker, as they had under the recently promoted Ted Timberlake. Devers then climbed into his staff car and roared off.
No sooner had Devers departed than Special Orders Number 174 set in motion another temporary deployment. Combat crews packed their gear for departure the following day, destination still unknown.
On Friday morning, June 25, the men were briefed on the first leg of their journey. With puffs of smoke and a rising roar, engines coughed to life. At two o’clock, the first 328th Squadron aircraft rumbled down the Hardwick runway and lifted into the English sky. The lead contingent climbed to their designated altitude, formed up, and set off on a southwest heading.
For Jake Epting, Special Orders 174 marked a new chapter in his combat tour. Epting had just been promoted to the rank of captain and he was a half-dozen missions shy of completing his tour. His trusted copilot, Hap Kendall, had his own crew now, so Epting had taken on a new copilot, Flight Officer Charles S. Young, who had joined the 93rd in April after serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England. Bombardier Al Naum had flown his twenty-fifth mission to La Pallice on May 29, but he was still with the crew, awaiting further orders. Lieutenant Edward Weir, who had been among the last Americans released from Spanish captivity, was also in his usual spot at the navigator’s table in the nose.
Ben’s world in the back of the plane had seen dramatic changes. Of the six enlisted men who had accompanied Epting to Africa in December, only Ben and his close friend, radio operator Red Kettering, remained. With four gunnery slots open on his crew, Epting had added a mix of familiar faces and new arrivals. The familiar face was Sergeant Harold E. Dafoe, a tough, twenty-one-year-old fur trapper from Canton, New York, near the Canadian border. The three new faces among Epting’s gunners stood out because of their impressive heights: Sergeant David L. Wightman, a twenty-year-old auto mechanic from Los Angeles, who stood a lanky five-foot-eleven; Sergeant James Wisniewski, a twenty-year-old from Detroit, Michigan, who topped out at just under six feet; and Staff Sergeant Robert N. Daves, a twenty-one-year-old from Englewood, New Jersey, who found it challenging to navigate the tight confines of Tupelo Lass with his gangly six-foot-four frame.
In Epting’s steady hands, Tupelo Lass rose into the skies over East Anglia and banked west. The B-24 passed over London after about half an hour, and the Cornwall peninsula loomed ahead. As the lead Liberators began their descent, the Cornish moorland and craggy coast flashed beneath them. The vanguard landed at an RAF base in the village of St. Eval. The trailing crews landed down the coast in the seaside village of Por-treath, and at other Cornwall bases.
After a night of heavy drinking, the predawn Reveille in the 328th Squadron dormitory at RAF St. Eval revealed a sorry sight on Saturday morning, June 26, 1943. “We were all up early, but not feeling very bright,” one 328th scribe reported.6 At 8:00 a.m., up and down the Cornwall peninsula, B-24 Liberators rose into the morning sky, maneuvered into formation, and headed to sea, past Land’s End, at the southwest tip of Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly beyond.
Flying south, the Liberators crossed the Celtic Sea, skirted the Brest peninsula of occupied France, and then cut across the Bay of Biscay. Around midafternoon, off the southwest coast of Portugal, the B-24s turned east for the final five-hundred-mile leg. Roaring eastward through the Straits of Gibraltar, the bombers hugged the coastline of North Africa. Nine-and-a-half hours after leaving England, the vanguard touched down at the French aerodrome of La Sénia, five miles south of a city etched in Ben’s memory: Oran, Algeria. Stiff from the long flight, the crews stepped onto African soil in the muggy afternoon heat.
Nearly four months after departing the continent in Spanish custody, Ben was back in Africa for reasons that remained a closely held secret.
Chapter 25
THE BIG ONE
On Sunday morning, June 27, Ben and the other 93rd men awoke to the strains of “the best bugler any of us ever heard,” as one diarist wrote.1 Sand and dust whipped off the Sahara as the men arrived at La Sénia airfield and loaded their aircraft. At 9:30 a.m., the lead elements of the 328th Squadron rose into the blue Mediterranean sky. They formed up at three thousand feet, turned east into the morning sun, and began climbing.
Beyond the battlefields of Tunisia, where the remnants of Rommel’s shattered army had surrendered on May 13, the 93rd bombers retraced the long route of the Axis retreat across North Africa. Off to their left, Allied convoys plied the shimmering blue waters of the Mediterranean. To their right loomed the vastness of the Sahara Desert. They crossed into Libyan airspace and passed the city of Tripoli. In the late afternoon, the lead aircraft began their descent into a desert airstrip outside Benghazi, a battered former Italian colonial outpost that had changed hands five times since February 1941.
The 93rd had been assigned to a field designated Site Number 7, in a stretch of flat desert eighteen miles south of the city, near the Mediterranean coast. Ben and his comrades stepped into stifling heat and choking dust. Their welcoming committee included sun-bronzed British troops, wearing pith helmets and khaki shorts, and swarms of desert locusts. “It didn’t look any too pleasant to us,” one 93rd gunner wrote.2
Ben and the dwindling fraternity of 93rd veterans had seen it all before during their time at Gambut Main.
Trucks arrived and the men climbed aboard with their sleeping bags and gear and were driven a short distance to their new campsite, which consisted of two Nissen huts and a tent. The men retrieved their mess kits from their packs and lined up for their first meal at their al fresco mess hall. Flies descended as the men shoveled down Spam speckled with grains of desert sand.
After dinner, the men were issued cots and tents and set to work making camp. They were like a rowdy bunch of teenagers on a campout, hooting at those among them who struggled to secure their tents in the stiff breeze. Some of the men who had gotten their tents squared away commandeered a truck and drove to a nearby beach for a twilight swim. Nightfall brought a cool breeze, and the weary crews collapsed onto their cots for their first night in the Libyan desert.
As Ben and his comrades would discover in the days ahead, the low-level raid that had been the subject of so much speculation wouldn’t be their first order of business.
ON THE FIRST MORNING IN THEIR DESERT bivouac, the men of the 93rd awakened to the warble of desert larks exulting in the cool morning air. After a breakfast of oatmeal, powdered scrambled eggs, and coffee, the crews were trucked to their planes to unload gear and supplies. By the time they returned to camp at midmorning, a sandstorm blotted out the blazing sun.
