23 September 2006

Ghost in the Book

Dick is not always available when I need him. Sometimes I catch him out of the corner of my eye, in the brown chair fabric chair that came from his house in Pennsylvania. Not the one with the cushion that is still square. The one that is a little lumpy from long use, and where I too fall asleep.
Sometimes he is right here, like when I found the copy of his mission card from 1944, with the columns of missions and places typed by an admin clerk at Base Ops for the 487th Bomb Group (H) at Lavenheath, England.

Because the card was typed as the missions occurred, the columns are misaligned. Neatness did not count as much as the number of the entries, which reflected operational missions. Dick dug the card out six years ago, when he was still living, and sent it to me.

There are two columns with a total of thirty entries. There are place-names that are familiar, and some that are obscure. Liege and Tours in France, and Cologne and Dusseldorf in Germany. What might have been in a place called Misberg? It is the first of the names that has an asterisk to the left of the column.

A header note on the Base Ops card states: * Flew Lead Crew.

Eighteen of the thirty missions are so noted, which meant that Dick's airplane, Buzzin' Betsy, was the first one to arrive at the target and mark the place where the bombs would fall for the ones after. Hundreds of others.

Because of the danger, Lead Crews had to fly fewer missions than others. Most had to complete 35 operational flights. Some would be “milk runs.” Others went to Berlin, or into the white-hot steel hell over the synthetic oil plant at Merseburg.

One of the heavy Bomb Groups- the Bloody Hundredth, flew 306 missions, and in the process lost 177 aircraft. There were nominally ten men on each crew, and imagine those airplanes taking off at twenty second intervals. Do the math. The crews did.

A lead crew completed their tour at thirty missions. Arriving as a young man barely entitled to vote, Dick flew his first operational mission on the 7th of May,1944. By 20 June, he was commander of a Lead Crew.

By the second of November he was done with it. He had his “Lucky Bastard” certificate for surviving.

Six months, thirty missions. Two Distinguished Flying Crosses for personal valor in the air. A set of memories that would last a lifetime and beyond. He did not talk about it much. When I was young and foolish, I thought his service was romantic. He was gruff then, and acknowledged his time in England without much elaboration. But he lived his life in an extraordinary style. He did not fly after the war.

He did have a passion for machines that could perform. He settled on Corvettes eventually, which he drove with élan through his seventies, and of course the Little black truck with the turbo-charged engine that he drove to the dump when he needed to.

I talked to him once about recreating some of his missions.  It would require traveling to England and renting a plane, and of course the airstrip at Lavenham, Sussex, is gone now, salvaged for concrete. He did have a chance to see it with his children, and actually drive on it, as if the sedan was a heavily laden B-17, filled with ordnance and volatile gasoline and men with another twenty seconds behind him, and a hundred more.
We never organized the trip, and life being what it is, the opportunity to ask was gone before anyone was ready.

I looked over the card, when there was still time, and wondered about some of the cryptic notations. Some of the targets had no names- only the date, the number, and the word “Secret.”

I asked him about it, and he snorted with the good natured contempt of the bird-man for the ground-pounder.

“Naturally an intelligence guy would pick up on the secret mission designation. I don't know who they thought was going to read the mission cards.” To check some of the targets he found his log book, and an invaluable source that he recommended: Roger Freeman's "Mighty Eighth War Diary."

Freeman combed through the records of the thousands of missions and catalogued them in a sort of bombing encyclopedia. Dick had a copy, which he used to cross-check his log book.  “Glad I have it,” he said. “The details get a bit hazy after 60-odd years.”

He provided the actual names of the places he visited, and then of course he was gone.

I didn't have any reliable way to check with him on some of my other questions. So I decided to get a copy of the Freeman book, and index the missions, fix them in time and space as he had.

The book is long out of print, but not unavailable. I managed to track down a copy that was reportedly in pretty good shape at a bookshop in Ohio. It arrived in the snail-mail the other day, a big thick reference book with a cellophane protective cover. I flipped it open to the 7th of may, 1944 and began to index the missions with yellow post-its for future reference.

As I did so, I realized this book had lived somewhere else since it was printed by the Jane's Reference Publishing group a quarter century ago. There was yellow high-lighter on some missions, passages outlined, and on some pages a spidery ink commentary more cryptic than the notations on Dick's mission card.

The first was on the day that the New York Times correspondent Robert Post was shot down and killed with the 44th Squadron “Flying Eight Balls.” The ink says that Walter Cronkite from UPI and Andy Rooney from Stars and Stripes were flying that day as well.

There is no name on the fly-leaf, no explanation of whose ex-libris this was from. Most of the notes involve the Bloody Hundredth, and the missions of late 1943.

I sighed as I slipped the pages. Another mystery. A ghost in the book.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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