THE 93RD FLEW TWO MORE MISSIONS from their base in the Libyan desert, a pair of tactical raids aimed at the enemy air and rail systems in Italy. Fifteen 93rd Liberators were assigned to an August 19 raid on Foggia’s rail marshaling yards and fourteen of the group’s B-24s were assigned to an August 20 raid on an air storage depot eighteen miles north of Naples. The 93rd didn’t lose any aircraft on either raid. The Moran crew—Ben included—sat out both raids.
Rumors were rife the group would soon be leaving the Libyan desert. Speculation swirled about what was next. Would they return to England? Relocate to Tunis? Italy, maybe? What seemed clear was they finally were poised to leave their godforsaken Sahara camp. Their departure would happen none too soon for the 93rd’s weary men and worn aircraft.4
By mid-August, a number of 93rd men were battling psychological problems. Among them was Bill Dawley, the Red Ass gunner who had been wounded in the head on Ben’s first raid the previous December. Dawley had returned to combat in February 1943, and had made the second trek to North Africa as a gunner on Hap Kendall’s crew. He had survived the Ploiesti raid, but afterward found himself struggling with what is now recognized as post-traumatic stress. “I was getting pretty shaky,” Dawley later recalled.5
Dawley was thinking of taking himself off combat duty when he went to talk to the 409th Squadron’s operations officer, who happened to be Jake Epting. “I’m quitting,” Dawley told his former pilot. Epting patiently tried to talk Dawley down. “You’re going to end up with guard duty or buck private or KP [kitchen patrol] the rest of your days,” Epting said.
Dawley didn’t like the sound of that. He thought it over and when his crew was next assigned a mission, he showed up for the briefing and reported to his aircraft as if nothing had happened. When Hap Kendall taxied out for takeoff, Jake Epting spotted Dawley standing in the waist window and gave him an approving nod. Dawley continued his quest for twenty-five missions.6
Within days, the 93rd’s long-awaited orders finally arrived.
ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 26, 1943, Ben and his comrades bade farewell to the desert and began the first leg of their welcome journey back to England.
Over the course of the long flight westward across North Africa, places fraught with memories of close calls and comrades lost flashed beneath Ben: There was Tripoli, the target of Ben’s tenth mission with the Epting crew on January 21 and the mission on which Lew Brown had lost four men; Biskra, the Algerian provincial capital which they had overflown on the flight to Benghazi two months earlier, when the mysterious Big One that had brought them back to Africa had yet to claim so many comrades; Oran, the first frenetic city that Ben had experienced in North Africa the previous December; Oudja, the Moroccan border city that the Red Ass crew had overflown in the frantic minutes before Jake Epting executed his miraculous landing in a mountain valley about seventy miles away; and Marrakech, Morocco, Winston Churchill’s beloved “Paris of the Sahara,” their final stop before bidding farewell to Africa. They had covered 1,741 miles during the day and landed around dusk.
The next morning they headed for England’s Cornwall peninsula. They were still airborne when darkness fell. The trip took a dire turn when sand-scoured engines faltered on several aircraft.7
Ben was among those experiencing a harrowing end to this latest North Africa adventure. For a time, it seemed to Ben, Homer Moran, and Ples Norwood that they were reliving the near-fatal flight that had marked their previous departure from North Africa in February. In the dark, Moran kept a close watch on a failing supercharger that made one of his engines glow like a blazing fire. “I never sweated so much in my life,” he later recalled.8
Safely on the ground at RAF bases in Cornwall, many of the 93rd men celebrated their return to England by getting drunk at the officers’ and enlisted clubs of their British hosts. The cool air, green surroundings, dark beer, English women, paved streets, sturdy barracks—all were welcome sights to men worn out by the rough living of these past weeks.
To a man, the 93rd veterans welcomed their return to England, without much thought for the deadly implications of what that meant. They had left behind a theater defended by a shattered and dispirited enemy, but Western Europe was a different ballgame. Ben would be flying his bonus missions against a German fighter force and air defense system that was approaching peak strength.
Chapter 33
THE KILLING MONTH
Ben’s quest to fly another five missions with the 93rd seemed star-crossed almost from the beginning. When the weather actually allowed the 93rd to take off on a raid, some mechanical problem would force Homer Moran to turn back. On other days, either the Moran crew wasn’t scheduled to fly or the weather grounded the entire group. Ben faced one frustration after another. The 93rd logged only three raids during the first half of September, and then in mid-September the group was ordered back to North Africa. More bad weather wreaked havoc on operations and the group logged only five missions during this two-week assignment. When Ben returned to England on October 4, more than forty days after joining Homer Moran’s crew as top turret gunner, he had logged only one of his five bonus missions.
Ben had barely settled back into his Hardwick Nissen hut when General Ira Eaker set in motion a series of raids in a final attempt to cripple key German industries before bad weather cloaked the continent. The first blow was scheduled for October 8, two weeks to the day since Ben had logged his twenty-sixth mission over Pisa, Italy. The Moran crew was among twenty-one 93rd crews—four of them commanded by pilots making their combat debut—assigned to what Eaker had designated a “maximum effort” against strategic German targets. The specific objectives were submarine pens, shipyards, and a Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighter factory located around the city of Bremen.
It was yet another brutal day for the Eighth Air Force, with Eaker’s forces losing thirty bombers over Bremen and the nearby Vegesack district. But once again, through skill and selfless acts of courage, the 93rd defied the odds. Ben and his comrades made it back to Hardwick without the loss of an airplane or the death or serious injury of one of their men.
Ben recorded his twenty-seventh mission in his log.
BEN DIDN’T HAVE LONG TO WONDER when he might fly again or whether his luck would hold. The 93rd was put on alert for a mission shortly after the planes that bombed Bremen and Vegesack landed, and the Moran crew once again was among those on the list to fly.
When the curtain was pulled back in the briefing room the following morning to reveal the day’s target, the historic significance wasn’t lost on Ben and other 93rd old-timers. They were headed to East Prussia and the ports along Poland’s Baltic coast—the deepest penetration into Europe that the Eighth Air Force had yet attempted from England.1 As with the previous day’s mission, it would be another “maximum effort,” with the Eighth’s B-17s and B-24s coordinating their efforts to hit four targets: the German industrial cities of Anklam and Marienburg and the Polish ports of Gdynia and Danzig (now Gdansk).
The 93rd drew as its target the submarine base at Danzig, on the Baltic Sea. Around three hours after seventeen 93rd Liberators took off from Hardwick, the formation neared Danzig. The target was covered by smoke and heavy flak, but that didn’t deter Moran. The gunners watched their bombs disappear into the murk, and then braced to fight their way home through prowling enemy fighters as Moran banked their aircraft to the west.
But the enemy fighters never materialized, or at least not in the numbers or with the ferocity and determination feared. Some of the crews saw seven or eight twin-engine Ju-88 fighter-bombers, but the enemy fliers merely watched the 93rd formation and waited for stragglers to drop from it. Although the 93rd aircraft maintained a tight formation for the most part, coming and going, the final tally at Hardwick revealed two missing bombers.
One of the missing crews was from the 409th Squadron, and they were men well known to Ben. The pilot was a Ploiesti veteran, Miles League, and his ship was Satan’s Sister. The men were last seen over Bornholm Island, headed for Sweden, raising hopes that they had made an emergency landing. The other bomber was Piccadilly Filly, piloted by one of the new 93rd pilots, Thomas W. Atkinson, and less was known about its immediate fate. As it turned out, League and his entire crew had reached neutral Sweden on three engines and made a successful belly landing at a local air base.2 Atkinson had also reached Sweden, in even more miraculous fashion, but at a dearer cost.
Piccadilly Filly had limped away from the target with two engines out and damage to its tail section and controls. For reasons unknown, Atkinson’s navigator, Second Lieutenant Farren F. Shafer, bailed out through the nosewheel hatch and dropped into the frigid sea, never to be seen again. Atkinson instructed the rest of his men to stay put while he figured out their next move. They contemplated ditching at sea, a dangerous proposition under the best of conditions, but decided to remain with Piccadilly Filly. Atkinson and his copilot kept the crew aloft with their two portside engines long enough to complete the twenty-mile crossing to the Swedish coast, where the pilots executed a crash landing. “Lieutenant Atkinson, only twenty-one years old, saved our lives,” gunner Nicholas Caruso recalled years later.3
As tragic as the day had been for the 93rd, it was worse for the other Eighth Air Force groups who flew the raid. Twenty-four of 430 aircraft were shot down, with 124 men killed in action, 131 taken prisoner, and 19 interned.4
It was the first anniversary of the 93rd’s combat debut, and the group’s publicist—Ben’s friend Cal Stewart—interviewed several men for a story he wrote for release to news correspondents. Among the 93rd men Stewart interviewed was the Japanese American farm boy whose promotion to a combat crew he had chronicled in a newspaper article ten months earlier.
“The Traveling Circus, in what was probably the longest hop by Libs in the ETO [European Theater of Operations], raided the sub pens at Danzig, one of the oldest cities in Europe,” Stewart’s latest story began. Stewart followed with a quick succession of quotes from several 93rd men who had flown the raid. First up was Ben, described by Stewart as “a tired-looking gunner” who had logged his twenty-eighth mission on the Danzig raid.
The back-to-back raids had underscored for Ben the perils of his commitment to fly five extra missions. The raids he was now flying weren’t nearly as long as the 93rd’s raids to Ploiesti or Wiener Neustadt or Rome, but the targets in greater Germany were more heavily defended. In response to Cal Stewart’s questions about how the summer missions from Libya compared with those the 93rd now faced, Ben offered a calibrated response. “You have to be on your toes here,” Ben said, using a popular sports analogy. “Not like it was in Africa.”5
After back-to-back raids, Ben and the Moran crew got October 10 off, but the 93rd was in action for a third consecutive day. The 93rd contingent assigned to fly the mission—including another six new pilots—enjoyed an easy day, but their assignment to draw German fighters away from their B-17 comrades failed. The Flying Fortress groups lost another thirty aircraft in an attack on the German city of Münster, bringing the Mighty Eighth’s losses over three days of raids to eighty-eight bombers and nearly nine hundred men.
October 11 marked the fourth consecutive day of action for the 93rd, with another planned raid into Germany, but weather forced a cancellation. Yet another attempt was made the following day to bomb the German city of Emden, and nine 93rd aircraft got aloft before the raid was canceled because their Thunderbolt escorts couldn’t get off the ground.6
After another day lost to inclement weather, the 93rd crews were alerted to prepare for a mission the following day, October 14. Rumors were soon confirmed. The 93rd was to be part of another double-strike raid on Regensburg and Schweinfurt, the infamous targets that had cost Ira Eaker sixty B-17s in August. The Liberators had been relegated to low-risk diversion duties on a costly Stuttgart raid the previous month and the Münster raid earlier that week, but they would be full partners with the Flying Fortresses in this latest attempt to cripple German production of Me-109 fighters at Regensburg and ball bearings at Schweinfurt.
The plan called for the 93rd commander, Colonel Leland Fiegel, to lead a combined force of sixty Liberators to Schweinfurt, but things unraveled for the B-24s almost from the outset. Only eighteen of twenty-four 93rd Liberators got airborne, and only two of the three B-24 groups assigned to the raid—the diminished 93rd force and the 392nd Bomb Group contingent—arrived at the rendezvous point over the North Sea.
Escorted by a squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts, the Liberators angled south over the Dutch coast and the countryside of occupied Holland. The Liberators had just crossed into German airspace over Aachen when the Thunderbolts reached the limits of their range. The Liberators would be on their own for their remaining ninety minutes of circuitous flight to Schweinfurt and the critical first hour of the return journey to England.
About twenty minutes farther south, flying over Luxembourg before making a hard left to Schweinfurt, Fiegel made a fateful decision. His planned force of sixty Liberators was now down to twenty-two aircraft after the botched rendezvous and assorted mechanical mishaps that had prompted other Liberators to head for home. Rather than press on to a target that struck fear in the hearts of Eighth Air Force men after the August raid, Fiegel changed plans. With Fiegel in the lead, the Liberators banked to the north in a diversionary maneuver aimed at drawing enemy fighters away from Regensburg and Schweinfurt.7
As Fiegel was leading his Liberators on a flight down and back up Germany’s western fringe without any losses, more than three hundred Eighth Air Force B-17s were locked in three hours and fourteen minutes of costly combat. The American bombers inflicted significant damage on the Me-109 factory at Regensburg and the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, but it came at a high price. The Germans shot down twenty-eight B-17s on the way to their targets and another thirty-two on the return flight.8
The loss of 642 American airmen on what was soon being called Black Thursday had a devastating impact on the mental health of the Eighth Air Force bomber crews. “After Black Thursday, morale in the Eighth plummeted to a new low and commanders worried about a crew revolt,” historian Donald L. Miller wrote in his classic history of the Eighth Air Force campaign, Masters of the Air. “‘I will never fly another mission, regardless of the cost,’ a gunner told his friends in the privacy of their Nissen hut, where twelve of the twenty cots were empty that night.”9
At a moment when Ben was trying to survive three more raids, the second double-strike attack on Regensburg and Schweinfurt had plunged the American daylight bombing campaign into crisis.
