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Ludwigshafen Every soldier knows it can happen, and at times he wonders what it could be like-the flash, the pain and moment of bitter regretlight darkening into invisible gray, and then a forever-lasting silence . It's to be expected in the great barrages at Berlin or Merseburg , but the Germans have enough going on here too to keep their tracking guns well warmed. We've just trampled on the 1. G. Farben Chemical Works in Ludwigshafen. It's midday September 3; mission twenty-three. We've made a thirty-mile bomb run from the southwest through surprisingly scattered flak, and each of our dozen birds has dropped nine 50o-pounders and turned over the Rhine on a long curving course downstream which is in fact northward toward Worms. The river is crowded with barges, and I suspect that many of them have one or more batteries offour heavies that they can bring to bear. I've caught sight of gun flashes, and very soon we'll know how well schooled their gunners are. Complex optical instruments and trig tables allow them to triangulate our altitude and angular speed and even the degree of our turn. They know the muzzle velocity of their shells and their deceleration rate; hence the trajectory and time it will take for them to overtake and meet us at an exact point in space. Their fuses have been timed for that special moment. The only 129 Return from Berlin things the gunners can't know on their first shots are the vagaries of the deflecting winds through which the shells must pass. Twenty-six thousand feet up and several miles' lead is a hell of a lot of space. They can mess up, and more often than not they do, or they'd have won the war by now. Jardine used to say, "It's the luck of the pot shot, and it depends on whose luck you're talking about." The first four 88s burst about a hundred yards ahead of us-four more from another battery explode a bit to their left, fired a second after the first ones had left their guns. Russell turns back to a straight run; we can take some evasive action with our bombs gone, but not much for the sake ofprotective order in the formation. They've fired again; many are firing now. A shell has passed through the middle of our right wing almost unnoticed, seemingly soundless in the ambient noise until the explosion occurs a fraction of a second later at a point thirty feet above and out a like distance from the right gun port. It rakes the plane with several hundred pieces ofshrapnel ranging in size from a broken pencil tip to jagged fragments an inch or more in length. None of us is hit, Lord of mercy, but Death is still deciding what to do about us. A tall geyser of fuel is instantly transformed into a vapor cloud while mixing with the hot exhaust gases from the number-three engine-this could be that ultimate moment , but it isn't. Nature is indecisive. One would have expected it much sooner. Russ doesn't wait for the chemistry of the instant. He chops the throttle and pulls the mixture, killing engine three; and all within the same moment, he feathers the prop, stopping its rotation, which otherwise would drive the remaining hot exhaust into the ready-toblow air fuel mixture. "Grilley," Russ bellows, "exactly where the hell are we, and how far to coast-out?" Well, I do have my pencil on our German place in spite ofwhat's happening. "Worms, seventeen miles down-river, which means north. You should be turning to a heading of 270 degrees by now. We're about 300 from Calais, but that's not the formation's course. 130 Ludwigshafen They'll coast out at Abbeville. It's almost the same land distance, but twice as far over water." So-in a minute or two Russ, Pyles, and I have done some highaltitude math-our takeoff gross weight had been about 65,000 pounds. Ofthat we've relieved ourselves of4,500 pounds ofbombsburned more than 7,000 pounds offuel at six pounds per gallon getting here, and about 900 pounds have been lost from the bulls-eye tank. This has lightened us considerably, and it will be downhill, so to speak, all the way home. But while the others with their four engines throttled back...

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