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189 Chapter 14 Last Flights The radio operator’s table dropped, Sergeant Scearce’s stomach leaped, and he braced his knees against the table to keep from falling into the heaving cockpit floor. Just outside his window, Scearce could see the silver propeller hub of Belle of Texas’ number 3 engine turning so fast it seemed to be standing still. On sunny days the hub spinners were shiny bright enough to blind you, but today they were grubby gray like a well-worn nickel. Rain pelted and spread across the cockpit glass and streaking rivulets raced across the radio operator’s window. Just past number 3 the outboard engine was a ghostly dark shadow and the wingtip beyond wasn’t visible at all. Lt. Charlie Pratte and co-pilot Lt. Reginald Spence pushed the plane’s nose down to reduce altitude because they had been unable to get above the weather and decided to try downstairs. The long, thin wings of the Liberator fluttered up and down, an unsettling vision that knotted the stomachs and choked the throats of green airmen the first time they saw a B-24 flex like this, but Yankus, Findle, Scearce, Pratte, Spence, and navigator Ball weren’t green airmen. They weren’t rattled because the wings were flexing; they were rattled because the bomber was on its first flight after major repairs by men who didn’t usually work on 190 Finish Forty and Home B-24s and they were in the middle of the worst flying weather any of them had ever experienced. At altitude the big plane was tossed about, dropped, and snatched up again like a toy in a child’s hands. Descending through one thousand feet the wingtips flashed into view, gray-white misty patches rushing across them and past the windows of the plane as if some unseen jester was quickly opening and closing thick gray curtains. The right wing rose suddenly, the plane banked left, and it felt like the aircraft was going to roll completely over, but Scearce could see the artificial horizon in the middle of the instrument panel already coming slowly back to level and the sensation they were still rolling left was just an illusion. The gyroscopic horizon was the only visible reference for the plane’s attitude, and Scearce watched it until the ball showed level and his stomach stopped trying to convince him that the plane was on its side and still going over. He thought the fellows in CASU-16’s mess hall would be disappointed to know that the food they had prepared so carefully for the flight wouldn’t be eaten. At 500 feet the flashes of gray mist across the wings were less frequent and the splashes of rain on the windows eased enough to reveal a choppy swirling dark sea. Lieutenant Pratte pushed the bomber even lower and leveled out at fifty feet because it was the smoothest place he could find to ride out the storm. At fifty feet the plane rocked back and forth as the wind buffeted it and the six men aboard shifted their weight first one way and then the other. “We’re just going to have to stick it out,” Pratte said, and no one else spoke for a long time. Instead each man tried to find some place on the ocean’s surface for his eyes to focus, because there was no discernible horizon, the horizon’s line hidden by smudged gray sameness from overhead right down to the water just yards from the plane in any direction. “Visibility zero,” Scearce could picture in the pilot’s log. Last Flights 191 Finally Charlie Pratte turned to Scearce and said, “Go ahead and get an update from Hickam.” Scearce tried, but there was no reply. Or if there was a reply, it was buried in static so noisy and loud that he quickly pushed the headset up on his head. He followed up the request: “Weather bad, can’t receive you. Will try later,” and he dutifully recorded the transmission on his Form 35 Radio Log in the log book which had been creeping from one side of the radio operator’s table to the other. Belle of Texas made noises Scearce had never heard from an airplane, low rumbles and waves of metallic vibrations that seemed to move diagonally through the plane from one quadrant to another. The sounds of the plane and the storm mixed to produce a concert...

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