NOT LONG AFTER THE DEPARTURE OF HIS friends, Ben was awakened by the bustle of activity in the camp in the predawn hours of Friday, August 13, 1943. The 93rd’s record-breaking raid on the Me-109 fighter factory in Austria was finally happening.
The orders had been issued at 2:00 a.m., and that had unleashed a flurry of preparations by officers charged with overseeing the pre-mission briefing and mechanics and ordnance crews tasked with loading bombs, fueling aircraft, and fine-tuning engines for the early morning takeoff. The combat crew members who managed to sleep through the commotion were awakened at 4:00 a.m. and hustled off to breakfast, followed by a final briefing at 0530.
The weather in the Vienna area remained a concern, and that resulted in the takeoff being pushed back to 0715. But finally, with the veteran 330th Squadron pilot Packy Roche leading the formation and the new 93rd commander, Colonel Leland Fiegel, at his side as copilot, twenty-four crews of the 93rd climbed into the morning sky. A violent sandstorm two days earlier had fouled numerous aircraft engines, and six 93rd bombers turned back on the outbound flight because of engine troubles. A seventh 93rd Liberator landed on Malta with a fuel leak.
For the men who watched the crews depart, an even more nerve-racking day than that of a typical mission day followed. The outbound flight to Wiener Neustadt was eleven hundred miles, and even with auxiliary fuel tanks an attempt by the bombers to return to their desert airstrips outside Benghazi risked calamity. The plan called for the crews to proceed to Tunis after bombing the target, shaving 150 miles off the return and thus reducing the risk of fuel exhaustion. The six aircraft with engine problems returned to the desert airstrip during the course of the day, but after that the men in the camp settled in to a long day of waiting. That evening, Ben and the other men on the ground went to bed without hearing any news of how their comrades had fared.
Ben awakened to another morning of unsettling silence. The empty tents and short mess lines reminded the men of that terrible morning following the Ploiesti raid, but the preliminary reports on the morning of August 14 were good. The raid had gone well, and all but one bomber that attacked the target had landed safely in Tunis.
Gunner Donald Hudspeth, a twenty-two-year-old North Carolinian who had been sweating out the delays, had finally notched the first mission of his combat tour. Hudspeth had gotten a good taste of what lay ahead. He had trouble with his oxygen mask during the flight, and his aircraft, a battle-scarred 93rd original named Shoot Luke, had developed a fuel leak during the bomb run. Hudspeth had experienced flak for the first time, but it hadn’t been bad—the Germans had been caught by surprise and didn’t offer much resistance. Hudspeth and his crewmates had dropped their bombs and made their getaway. During the return flight over Italy, Hudspeth had seen his first enemy fighter, but the pilot had kept his distance. To the joy and relief of Hudspeth and his crewmates, Shoot Luke landed at Tunis at 7:30 in the evening.4
Back in the 93rd camp, the joy of the initial report of a successful mission was tempered by the news that one crew from Ben’s 409th Squadron was missing. The aircraft was piloted by a Texan named Alva (Jake) Geron, a lanky former Texas Tech basketball player. Ben knew Geron only by sight, but Dick Ryan, his good friend from the Epting crew, had been flying with Geron as a replacement gunner. Geron had lost three gunners on the Ploiesti raid—one killed and two wounded—and two other men had contracted dysentery, so he had flown the raid to Austria with five replacements. Dick Ryan had taken over one of Geron’s guns, and now he was missing.
Ben and other friends of the missing men sweated out the next few days until further word arrived. The news could hardly have been better. Jake Geron had made an emergency landing in neutral Switzerland, and he and his entire crew—Dick Ryan included—were now safe and enjoying the carefree lives of internees in the Swiss Alps.5 By the time the good news about Dick Ryan’s new adventure reached the 93rd camp, Ben had some news of his own. He was poised to join forces with an old friend from his sojourn in Spain for the climactic mission of his combat career.
Chapter 30
MORAN CREW
Twenty-seven-year-old Homer Moran was one of several 93rd copilots to earn promotions following the August 12 departure of the officers and enlisted men who had completed their combat tours. A year earlier, Moran had accompanied the 409th Squadron to England as a spare pilot, and through the fall and winter he had worked to earn the trust of peers in sporadic one-off assignments. By February, Moran was still looking for a permanent crew assignment when he boarded Red Ass at Gambut Main for the fateful flight that ended in miraculous fashion in Spanish Morocco.
After his release from Spanish custody and return to England in late March, Moran had finally landed a regular gig as Lew Brown’s copilot, filling the position vacated by the stress-debilitated Robert Quinlivan. Moran had flown the Rome and Ploiesti raids at Brown’s side as the Queenie copilot. They had escaped Ploiesti with heavy battle damage and sweated out the return until their emergency landing on Sicily. With Brown headed back to England, Moran took command of Queenie and her crew.
Throughout the 93rd, Moran was widely known as one of two Native American pilots flying with the group. The 328th Squadron’s Joe Avendano was a member of the Apache tribe and the fifth of twelve children born to migrant workers in Southern California. Moran was a member of the Sicangu or Brulè band of the Lakota people. He was the fourth of nine children born to a farm laborer and homemaker on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation.
For his first twenty years of life, Moran only occasionally had ventured beyond the boundaries of Rosebud. But as a tall, lithe teenager, he found his ticket off the reservation: basketball. He sharpened his game in high school with boys bearing traditional Sioux names like Felix Knife, Chris Yellow Robe, Dennis Walking Bull, and Vincent Crazy Bear. At the age of twenty, he earned a scholarship to Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen, South Dakota.1
Moran made a name for himself at Northern State with his good looks, engaging personality, and athletic prowess. On the basketball team, he became an all-conference starting guard by his junior year in 1938–39. As a senior, classmates elected him “most popular man” on campus and teammates chose him as their captain. But his peers and the local press always viewed Moran through a racial lens. The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader often reverted to stereotypes when writing about Moran, calling him the “Wandering Sioux of Northern Teachers” or Homer “Scout” Moran. Even more cringeworthy was the Argus-Leader piece that described Moran as “a full-blooded Sioux Indian [who] brings all his redmen sorcery to the court.”2
His teammates, many of whom were the children of German immigrants, invariably called him “Chief.” As a six-foot-two senior, Moran helped guide his team to the South Dakota College Conference title and a spot in the National Intercollegiate Basketball tournament in Kansas City. Their first-round matchup proved especially memorable for Moran because he played with a broken bone in his hand. Moran and his teammates kept the game close against their much taller opponents from Texas until late in the fourth quarter, ultimately losing by eight points.3 That was the last game of his college career. Later that spring, Moran lettered on the track team in the throwing events. And then, his years at Northern State ended in mystery.
When commencement exercises were held on May 30, 1940, Moran wasn’t among the students who received a diploma. His name didn’t appear on any lists of students earning a degree in the school’s programs of varying length. He slipped away quietly, as if he had never been there. He returned to the Rosebud reservation and the bleak prospects that awaited a young Brulè man in his mid-twenties, even one with college credits and athletic success to his name.
Education had been beyond the reach of most of the Moran family, making it nearly impossible for Homer’s parents and siblings to extricate themselves from the poverty that was a legacy of the Lakota people’s forced transition from lives of hunting and gathering to farming and herding. Neither of Homer’s parents had advanced beyond the eighth grade, and none of Homer’s closest siblings graduated from high school. His fourteen-year-old brother Richard had completed only three years of elementary schooling at the time of the 1940 federal census.
The 1940 census found the Moran family living on the reservation in a rural rental home valued at $5. Only one of the seven family members listed as residents held a job: Homer’s twenty-year-old sister Bertha, who described herself as a “servant” in a “private home.” Another sister, twenty-two-year-old Mary, identified herself as a seamstress who was “seeking work.” When Homer registered for the draft in Rosebud on October 16, 1940, someone drew a line through the spaces on the form for his employer’s name and address.
Basketball had given Homer Moran his first extended glimpse of life beyond the reservation. By 1941, it was clear that military service was his best hope to escape Rosebud.
ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1941, MORAN ENLISTED in the army. He would be one of four Moran brothers who wore the uniform in World War II. One became an army medic and ended the war on Okinawa. Another was an Army Air Forces cook. A third was an army engineer in Europe.
Homer was posted in San Diego when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath, Moran’s unit was sent to Los Angeles to secure defense plants from saboteurs and a feared Japanese invasion. Among other tasks, Moran and his comrades installed antiaircraft batteries around the Burbank airport, known at the time as the Lockheed Air Terminal.
Lockheed used the facility to test aircraft that its workers assembled in nearby factories. Moran had never been in an airplane, but after weeks of watching P-38 fighters and various bombers take off and land, he and his buddies decided to apply for flight school. Within a month, Moran began pilot training in Oxnard, California, north of Los Angeles.4
In July, he earned his wings in expedited fashion at the army’s Victorville advanced flying school in San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles. He was sent to Florida to learn to fly B-26 medium bombers, but after less than a week he was transferred to a B-24 unit in Fort Myers that was poised to deploy overseas. It was his introduction to the 93rd Bomb Group.
Moran accompanied the 93rd’s flight echelon to Grenier Field, New Hampshire, where the crews picked up new B-24s. He still had never flown in a B-24 before being ordered to New York City, where he boarded the Queen Elizabeth with the group’s ground echelon.5 Now, less than eighteen months after his first flight in a single-engine trainer, Homer Moran was poised to command a four-engine bomber crew in combat.
Ben knew the outline of Homer Moran’s backstory from their weeks together in Spain. They hailed from the same part of the country—the Kuroki farm was about 140 miles due south of the Moran residence on the Rosebud reservation—and they had gotten along well. Ben would never trust another pilot as much as he trusted Jake Epting, but, given the choice between Homer Moran and one of the green pilots that had been with the 93rd only weeks, Ben preferred to take his chances with the big South Dakotan. An association with the Moran crew offered Ben a bonus: He would be reunited with a friend from the Epting crew, former Red Ass mechanic Ples Norwood, now serving as Moran’s flight engineer and top turret gunner. The details were worked out. When the Moran crew took off on its next mission, Ben would join them in his quest to complete his combat tour.
AROUND MIDDAY OF SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, shocking news reached the 93rd camp. Two days earlier, one of the new pilots assigned to the group—a well-liked Minnesotan with a flair for flying—had fallen ill with a sore throat and had been taken to a military hospital in Benghazi. Now word arrived that twenty-eight-year-old George Larson was dead. The cause of death was listed as a “throat infection,” but the truth was that Larson had contracted polio during a trip into Benghazi or an encounter with a local vendor. He was such a vibrant, handsome fellow that comrades were shaken by his loss. Other 93rd men had contracted mysterious and debilitating illnesses over the previous weeks, and Larson’s death put the camp on edge.
Some of the men wouldn’t hear the news about George Larson’s untimely passing until later in the afternoon, for they had headed off to the nearby seashore for a swim. Some of the men splashed in the surf while others gathered to watch a swim meet between the 93rd and a British Halifax bomber group based nearby. After much spirited cheering, the meet ended in a tie. “It was all good fun,” diarist Brutus Hamilton declared.
In the late afternoon, the men were put on alert for a mission the following morning. Homer Moran and his crew occupied a spot in the lineup. Ben wouldn’t have to wait long for his shot at number twenty-five. At a briefing that evening, he learned their target was an important Axis airfield at Foggia, twenty miles inland from Italy’s eastern Adriatic coast.
It was getting late by the time the men retired to their tents. If all went according to plan, Ben would be off for Italy with Homer Moran at first light.
Chapter 31
A DISAPPOINTING FINALE
At five o’clock on Monday morning, August 16, 1943, Ben and his comrades awakened in the cool darkness, dressed, and shuffled off to breakfast and a final briefing. Around 6:45 a.m. local time—0445 GMT—the lead ship took off.
In the cockpit of Queenie, Homer Moran and his copilot, Lieutenant Henry Podgurski, guided their B-24 down the Site 7 runway along with two other bombers and rose above the dun-colored desert. In the twenty-three-year-old Podgurski, Moran had a cockpit partner with seasoning that far exceeded his years. Most pilots and copilots were college boys, many of whom had been introduced to a cockpit in a campus course. The working-class Podgurski had come from a very different background. He had earned his spot in Queenie’s cockpit by logging more than three hundred flight hours with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Tall and thin—his draft record listed him as six-foot-two and 155 pounds—Podgurski was the child of Polish immigrants. He had grown up in an ethnic enclave that centered family, Polish heritage, and Roman Catholicism in his life. Podgurski’s parents ran a Polish restaurant in Manor, a town in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, just east of Pittsburgh.
At the time he registered for the draft on July 1, 1941, Podgurski was a skilled laborer in the Westinghouse Manufacturing Company’s sprawling East Pittsburgh plant. By 1941, production was shifting hard to defense work, and workers at the plant specialized in building huge waterwheel generators and other power equipment required for President Roosevelt’s massive defense buildup.
Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland had caused great anguish in the Polish American communities of America. By the fall of 1941, with America still nominally neutral, Podgurski enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force on October 2. After a year of training, he earned his wings in Canada, and in the autumn of 1942, he deployed to England aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
By early 1943, with Ira Eaker desperate for pilots to replenish his Eighth Air Force losses, Podgurski transferred into the US Army Air Forces. He took his oath in London and began service with the 93rd on March 24, 1943. He had recently earned a promotion from flight officer to second lieutenant by virtue of his work as a copilot in the July raids on Italian targets and then the Ploiesti low-level raid. Now, the blue-eyed, brown-haired Polish American flier sat beside Homer Moran as Queenie joined the formation circling above the Libyan desert.
