Bomber Pilot: A Memoir of World War II

3 Ted's Flying Circus

3 Ted's Flying Circus The crews of my squadron came into the staging area the last of the group. This was in accord with the way the movement out of Denver was ordered. I was determined not to get left behind, and so when I got into staging I did everything I could to rush up the departure. As a result I managed to get ahead of them all, and my ship was the first one in the group to leave for overseas . I picked an excellent crew with the ship I was Hying, that of Second Lieutenant Lloyd H. Hughes of Corpus Christi, Texas. Hughes was a laughing, youngish, handsome lad and a muchbetter -than-average pilot. I had taken Fowble out of his assistant operations job and made him a Hight commander of C Flight. This Hight consisted of his own crew, Hughes's crew, and the crew of Lieutenant Robert Lee Wright of Austin, Texas. As a patriotic Kentuckian I was a little jealous of the ascendancy of Texans, but I had to admit that next to Kentuckians they were about the toughest competitors of all. I felt that perhaps Hughes somewhat resented my taking over as pilot of his ship for the long hop across the ocean. He probably was a better pilot than I, since administrative duties had recently kept me from Hying as much as he did. But I wanted 60 Ted's Flying Circus to sit in the pilot's seat and "fly my own ship" across, although it was really Hughes's ship. He took it with good nature. From the staging area, by a couple of hops, we soon reached our jumping off point in Newfoundland, where we stopped momentarily . The weather was reasonably good over the Atlantic, with a prospect of soon getting worse. And so we were almost immediately briefed for an early night takeoff. As the sun was sinking low on the horizon in the subarctic night we took off. It was June 11, 1943. At that time of year and in the latitudes we flew, we didn't see much darkness on our way across, except where we met heavy cloud cover. As we cruised along, the sun dipped a little lower than it was at takeoff; then it seemed to ride along on the rim of the horizon for a long time. Finally it dropped into the sea for about half an hour at midnight and then popped up again. There was always a red glow in the northern sky, and beneath us we could see the cold black water, sometimes with great snowy icebergs floating in mock peacefulness. I set the autopilot on course and sat placidly in the pilot's seat watching the indicator lights on the automatic control panel flash lazily as the impulses of the servos were transmitted to the controls. The wheel in my lap moved slightly back, slightly forward , a little to left and then right in a jerky, mechanical way. It reminded me of the wheel of the car in the old Topper movies when the invisible hero was driving. Here we were, a bomber load of people who had never seen the other side of the ocean, flying our own airplane over to join the war. Beyond a doubt within the next few months the greatest and perhaps even the last adventures of our lives would be taking place. From time to time I checked my position and heading with Lieutenant Sidney Pear, the navigator. Pear was a New Jerseyite from Weehawken and a navigator whose skill was exceptional. He knew how to use his sextant, and he was as busy as a pack rat facing a hard winter. I could see him up in the astrodome taking starshot after starshot. Then he would make his calculations and call me on interphone and give me the word on our course and, as expected, his readings continually placed us within a few miles of where we should have been. The engineer every half hour would stick his head in from Ted's Flying Circus 61 the Hight deck and report on fuel consumption. When we were half way across we were pulling along at thirty inches of manifold pressure and 2,000 RPM, indicating a good 165 miles per hour airspeed. When these readings were corrected for altitude and winds, I knew we had a true...