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Marlene Dietrich It didn't do much good to get to the Marlene Dietrich show early. There were no seats, and the crowd was quite fluid. You naturally expected to stand and to move about as the current flowed. She was going to arrive in Colonel Bowman's well-polished B-1? and climb down a little aluminum ladder from the front hatch, and we were all hoping that she would be wearing a short silk skirt like she did in The BlueAngel. At about ten minutes to five, the plane taxied up close, and engines one and four were cut. As soon as the props stopped, the hatch dropped open, and the earsplitting roar of the lusty crowd could be heard, I'd guess, quite distinctly in the village. But there was disappointment , deep disappointment. The most beautiful legs in the whole world were sedately covered by tan gabardine slacks, and even the little breeze that everyone was counting on was wasted. She was wearing a chamois helmet and aviation goggles pushed up on her forehead-for show, ofcourse-and when she reached the ground she pulled them offand shook her curly locks with a graceful tilt ofthat most lovely head. Colonel Bowman went through an unnecessary introduction, but even the PA system was overwhelmed. Then, in spite ofthe total disorder, Dietrich stepped to the microphone and the colonel yelled 86 Marlene Dietrich for everybody to shut up. At first she spoke to us in her deep, husky version of English, and then she switched to German. God, what a beautiful language. How could our cruel enemies have such a native tongue? But the answer was, of course, that they couldn't make it sound like that. Then she sang, and even with a tinny piano behind her, the air changed to antique gold dust. "Just see what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I died of the same," she crooned, with a gesture and wink worth a million bucks. Everybody screamed their throats raw, and after an hour the likes ofwhich none of us would ever hear again, she finished in splendor with the saddest, most beautiful song to be heard anywhere in that year of 1944-"Lili Marlene," the favorite of the Luftwaffe and probably all German males past puberty, including flak gunners. I had to admit that when it came to such things, they may have had superior taste. 87 Saint-La The Eighth Air Force high command and its chain of subordinate unit commanders made no special effort to keep us informed about the progress ofthe war. Except for Bowman's exhortations at briefing about destroying the enemy's sources and supplies of war materiel, little was said about how our actions fit into the big picture. In general , I could keep abreast through reports in the London papers, although I had more than a strong suspicion that there was a biased spin given to some ofthem in favor ofMontgomery- but at least we were on the same side. The Stars and Stripes was also ofsome value, but in a different way, sometimes even a humorous one. Usually we welcomed an occasional tactical mission to attack German ground forces, which, compared with the hardship and danger ofour long strategic flights, could be done with dispatch and relative impunity. Sometimes, though, we even found that our intervention had made a major contribution, and while the mass killing of German soldiers seemed somehow more conspicuously brutal than the destruction offactories, where I liked to delude myselfthat the workers were safe in bomb shelters, it was certain that we saved a great number of our own and helped to hasten the final collapse of the Wehrmacht in Normandy. Our thirteenth and fourteenth missions, flown on July 24 and 25, 88 ...

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