In the back of the aircraft, Ben enjoyed a reunion of sorts with former comrades from the Epting crew. In addition to Ples Norwood, Moran had added a pair of gunners from the post-Spain incarnation of the Epting crew: Harold Dafoe, the twenty-two-year-old fur trapper from the St. Lawrence River Valley in Upstate New York, and James Wisniewski, a husky twenty-one-year-old from Detroit.
As the twenty-four 93rd aircraft formed in a circling carousel, Moran eased Queenie into its assigned spot in the first flight of six aircraft. In all, more than ninety B-24s had been assigned to bomb one of the main airfields outside the southern Italian city of Foggia. Also assigned to the mission were the 93rd’s two sister units on loan from the Eighth Air Force—the 44th Bomb Group and the 389th—and the 376th Bomb Group.
In the aftermath of the final Axis surrender in Tunisia in mid-May, the German and Italian air force bases surrounding Foggia had emerged as a key target for the Allies. American and British aircraft had bombed Foggia’s civilian airport and rail station in three raids in the final days of May. Another raid followed on June 21. Allied bombers hit the Foggia railway station again on July 15 and July 22, killing or injuring nearly nine thousand civilians in those two raids alone. After several raids, Foggia’s weak air defenses had given the city and its nearby complex of airfields a favorable reputation among American and British bomber crews. “We were told that the air raid would be a ‘milk run,’” recalled 44th gunner Charles J. Warth.1
A milk run—aircrew slang for an easy mission—would be just fine with Ben and his crewmates today. Lounging in the area around the top turret, his assigned position since the July 9 raid on the Ponte Olivo airfield on Sicily, Ben settled in for the four-hour flight to Foggia.
AS THE B-24S FLEW NORTHWARD ACROSS the Mediterranean, their sights set on a target above the heel of the Italian boot, more than fifty US B-25 medium bombers and one-hundred-odd P-40 fighters based in Tunisia had their crosshairs centered on the toe of the Italian mainland. More specifically, these aircraft had been assigned to attack the Straits of Messina, where the final hours of the final act of the battle for Sicily was playing out.
In the thirty-seven days since American and British soldiers had splashed ashore the southern beaches of Sicily, Allied forces had slowly pushed the island’s defenders northward, and then northeast. After unrelenting combat through the heat of late July and early August, the remaining German and Italian defenders had withdrawn to a defensive pocket formed by the island’s Messina Peninsula. There, the Axis forces prepared for a last stand, with the port of Messina as their lifeline through which men and materiel continued to flow.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the supreme German commander in Italy, had urged the Wehrmacht leadership in Berlin to avoid another mass surrender of troops, like those at Stalingrad in February and Tunis in May. On July 26, the Berlin high command dispatched a hand-carried order to Kesselring, granting his request. The order directed Kesselring to prepare to reverse the flow of Sicily’s lifeline so that German soldiers and equipment could be evacuated by water, across the Straits of Messina, to the toe of the Italian mainland.
Kesselring had entrusted the defense of the Straits of Messina to forty-five-year-old Colonel Ernst-Günther Baade, a battle-scarred veteran of the North Africa campaign. A teenage cavalryman in the First World War, Baade had initially fought in North Africa with the 15th Panzer Division. In April 1942, he took command of the Wehrmacht’s 115th Rifle Regiment and saw extensive combat in Libya and Egypt. He earned renown for going into battle wearing a Scottish kilt and carrying a claymore, a two-handed Scottish sword, before he was seriously wounded in the first battle of El Alamein in July 1942.2
After a lengthy recuperation in Germany, Baade reported to Rome to serve as a Wehrmacht liaison to the Italian army’s supreme command. On July 14, four days after the Allied landings on Sicily, Kesselring dispatched Baade to the island to oversee the defense of the vital Straits of Messina. Under Baade’s direction, five hundred guns were installed on both the Sicilian and Calabrian shores to secure the straits from Allied air, naval, and ground attacks.
The evacuation orders of July 26 set in motion a flurry of activity around the straits. German engineers prepared camouflaged ferry sites on both shores and assembled a fleet of thirty-three barges, seventy-six motorboats, and a dozen Siebel ferries powered by twin pontoon-mounted airplane engines.3 In the first week of August, the evacuation quietly got underway with the safe passage of twelve thousand German military officers and civilian officials and four thousand vehicles.4
At 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11, Baade launched the final evacuation, Operation LEHRGANG (Curriculum). As German and Italian forces withdrew to successively shorter defensive lines on the Messina Peninsula, elements of the Hermann Göring Division slipped away from the island aboard Baade’s evacuation fleet. By the flickering light of oil lamps, concealed from Allied aircrews by overhead screens, the evacuation continued for six nights.5
The Allied response to the eventual evacuation of forty thousand German and seventy thousand Italian soldiers from Sicily remains one of the war’s most mystifying episodes. Historian Rick Atkinson notes that “Allied commanders had had no coordinated plan for severing the Messina Strait when HUSKY began, nor did any such plan emerge as the campaign reached its climax.”6 Allied ground and naval commanders were distracted by planning for the looming invasion of the Italian mainland, while Allied air commanders were already consumed by their quest to secure air superiority in Western Europe.
The efforts that were made unfolded in piecemeal fashion. The supreme Allied air commander in North Africa, British air chief marshal Arthur Tedder, initially committed US general Carl Spaatz’s two combat air forces in North Africa to block the escape, but an August 2 order prohibited the use of Spaatz’s B-17s. Within a week, the orders changed again.
Despite the errors and missed opportunities that unfolded over the next two weeks, daylight of August 16 found American and British troops within a dozen miles of Messina and closing—unaware that only a few hundred enemy troops remained in their path. At 5:30 that morning, the two most senior German commanders still on the island—the one-armed General Hans-Valentin Hube, overall commander of Sicily’s defense, and General Walter Fries, commander of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division—crossed to Calabria. With only a few boatloads of soldiers still to be evacuated, Hube and Fries had left the rearguard defense of the remaining ferry sites in the hands of some two hundred grenadiers.7
It had taken the Italians several days to catch wind of the German plan. Hitler had ordered the evacuation to proceed in secrecy for fear that the government that had replaced the dictator Benito Mussolini after his July 25 arrest would withdraw from the Axis Pact of Steel upon learning of the plan to abandon Sicily. Once Italian commanders discovered the German plan, they separately initiated their own escape, aided by the massive train ferry previously targeted by American bombers—a vessel capable of carrying three thousand men per trip.8
As Ben and his comrades flew northward across the Mediterranean, they were oblivious to the drama playing out some one hundred miles to their west. In the fateful hours ahead, the Italian commander of Messina’s port would depart after setting time bombs to destroy his docks, and the two hundred German grenadiers assigned to slow the approaching invaders would drive off a small US Army patrol—men of Company I, 7th Infantry Regiment—before falling back in the gathering darkness to board one of the final launches of Operation LEHRGANG. On one of those last boats to leave Sicily, German engineers lowered a bottle of wine into the sea and then drank a toast of the chilled vintage as they approached the Calabrian shore.9
Only much later would the magnitude of the Allied error at Messina be revealed, its bloody ramifications punctuated by the deaths of thousands of American and British soldiers in combat with some of the forty thousand Germans who escaped Sicily. But these were not the concerns of Ben and his comrades as they steeled themselves for whatever awaited at Foggia on this mid-August morning.
THE MORAN CREW’S MEDITERRANEAN crossing proceeded without incident, and a few minutes past 8:00 a.m., the American B-24s reached Italy’s southeastern coast. To their left lay the forested Apennine peaks and valleys of the Basilicata region. To their right the whitewashed hill towns of the Puglia region and the shimmering Adriatic Sea beyond. They had covered six hundred miles from their desert base, and Foggia lay about a hundred miles ahead—a thirty-minute flight at their current cruising speed. They were now on high alert for enemy fighters. Someone aboard Queenie spotted two enemy fighters off in the distance, but they ignored the 93rd bombers and barreled toward the formation of B-24s flying behind them.
About thirteen minutes after crossing the Italian coast, the mission went awry for the Moran crew. Queenie’s number three engine—the closest starboard engine to Ben’s top turret—began smoking and spewing oil. Homer Moran and Henry Podgurski shut off the malfunctioning engine and feathered the propeller to reduce drag and eliminate the possibility of a windmilling prop. They were only twenty minutes from the point where they would begin their straight-line sprint to the target, but the guidance to pilots in such a case was clear: If you can’t keep up with the formation, turn back. At 8:57 a.m., flying at an altitude of eighteen thousand feet, Moran eased Queenie from the leading edge of the 93rd formation and banked to the southeast. Now Queenie began a long and solitary flight back to Benghazi.
Their return route took them south-southeast over the Ionian Sea. Around forty minutes after turning back, still flying at seventeen thousand feet, Queenie’s bombardier jettisoned his load of thirty 100-pound bombs into the sea. Moran now began a steady descent in the hopes of avoiding prowling enemy fighters—a risk that was fairly high off the coast of Greece. The gunners fired five test rounds from each gun and prepared for action.
At 10:20 a.m., eighty minutes after turning back, they had descended to thirty-five hundred feet and were flying about thirty miles off the coast of Greece when they spotted a life raft floating in the sea, about a mile away from an oil slick. They couldn’t tell if anyone was in the raft, or what had caused the slick.
They flew on for another three hours without incident. A few minutes past one o’clock the coast of Libya came into sight. At 1:24 p.m., Queenie rolled to a stop at the Site 7 airfield. They had been airborne eight hours and thirty minutes. They hadn’t hit their target, but they had flown into enemy territory. That fact and their time aloft meant that each member of the Moran crew would be credited with a combat mission for the August 16 raid on Foggia.
For nearly two-and-a-half hours, Ben and his crewmates sweated out the return of the men they had set out with that morning. Finally, a few minutes before 3:00 p.m., the sound of engines could be heard in the distance and dark specks appeared in the sky to the north. Over the next hour, every plane that had been in the 93rd formation when Queenie aborted the mission landed. All had made it back, and there had been no casualties.
Fate had favored the 93rd on this day. They had encountered antiaircraft fire over the target that the crews variously rated as moderate to medium intensity. They had also encountered more than thirty enemy fighters. And at least ten enemy fighters had attacked from the rear, but they had come no closer than six hundred yards. The 93rd’s gunners reported shooting down at least ten enemy fighters, the group’s best day of gunnery since entering combat.
Their comrades of the 44th Bomb Group weren’t as fortunate. The Eight Balls, as they were known, had been flying off to the right of the 93rd when they came under attack by as many as fifty enemy fighters. The 44th lost seven bombers in the fight that followed.
AS NIGHT FELL OVER THE LIBYAN DESERT, a range of emotions filled the men of the 93rd. After takeoff that morning, Brutus Hamilton and several other officers had driven into Benghazi to attend the funeral of pilot George Larson, the polio victim. A new batch of mail arrived by plane later in the day. As always, the letters from home elicited joy, sadness, homesickness, and, sometimes, heartbreak. Edward Sand, a young 328th Squadron gunner, was shaken by the news that one of his friends back home in Detroit had been killed in action in the Pacific.10
Nightfall brought a USO show headlined by an A-list movie star and comedian, Jack Benny. As a full moon hung overhead, the 93rd men laughed and hooted and groaned as Benny told raunchy jokes, played a spirited violin, and bantered with his troupe and the audience.
Almost exactly a year earlier, Ben had pleaded with 93rd officers to be allowed to accompany the group on its overseas deployment. He had talked his way into a combat role with a B-24 crew, and now he had completed twenty-five missions—the set length of an Eighth Air Force combat tour.11 But the war was far from over in August 1943, and, in Ben’s mind, he still had much to prove. Although he never spoke of it, the disappointing fashion in which his twenty-fifth mission played out undoubtedly weighed on him. Perhaps that fact, as much as anything, explains the audacious decision Ben was poised to make.
Chapter 32
AN ENEMY AT PEAK STRENGTH
For the first time since beginning his combat tour the previous December, Ben awakened on August 17 with the satisfying knowledge that he had proven his detractors wrong. All the men who had mocked him and made snide comments about the color of his skin or shape of his eyes; the men who had questioned his loyalties, his trustworthiness, his courage; the bigoted 93rd sergeants who had twice tried to force him from the group, first in Louisiana and then Florida. He had proven them all wrong. He had pleaded for the opportunity to fight, and, when that opportunity arrived, he proved his mettle. He hadn’t ducked tough assignments. He had bombed the Fascist capital, braved the murderous defenses of Ploiesti, and delivered blows against a dozen other enemy targets. Now he could walk away and never fly another combat mission, if that’s what he wanted.
But he wasn’t sure that was what he wanted.
For a while now, Ben had been thinking about what he would do when he reached twenty-five missions. All his former crewmates and other comrades in the 93rd never doubted what they would do. Ben’s best friend, Red Kettering, couldn’t wait to return home to see family and friends. They had laughed and joked with each other the previous week as Red prepared to begin that journey. “Don’t forget to look up my folks in Nebraska—I’ve already written them to give you a delicious meal of fish heads and rice,” Ben had joked.1 When his home leave was up, Red would have his choice of cushy assignments, perhaps training new bomber crews or selling War Bonds or recruiting. Ben could expect the same, if that’s what he wanted.
But an idea had begun to form in Ben’s head. He would volunteer for another five missions. It would be his way of going above and beyond to prove his patriotism, to leave no doubt as to his loyalties. He would do it for his kid brother Fred, who had been booted out of the air service to dig trenches. From those first hours following the news of Pearl Harbor, he and Fred had aspired to prove their love of country by fighting for America, but Fred had been denied the chance. Now Ben could strike a symbolic blow on his brother’s behalf. He would fly another five missions in Fred’s honor.2
The final call wasn’t Ben’s to make. He made his way through the desert camp to the squadron headquarters tent to present his plan to K. O. Dessert. The 409th Squadron commander listened carefully to Ben and then gently pushed back. “Go home,” Dessert urged. Ben’s orders for his return to America had already been cut.
Ben respectfully protested. He tried to explain himself—why combat meant so much to him in the first place, and why flying another five missions meant so much to him now. Dessert heard him out and relented. Ben could remain with Homer Moran and his crew for another five missions.3
