World War II Remembered

Coming in Low under the Clouds

22 Ienlisted in the Army Air Force in 1943. My first assignment was for training at an Air Force radio school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota . Radio school was distinguished by the fact that the field was on a 24-hour schedule, with reveille (wake-up call) at 12 midnight. Keeping awake during classes was difficult, and if you were caught dozing three times you were forced to finish the class standing up. Getting proper sleep was equally difficult when those in the barracks had days off and made a lot of noise carousing around. When I was able to take Morse code 20 words per minute, I was shipped out to gunnery school in Laredo, Texas, a desolate area next to the Mexican border. At gunnery school, along with weapon disassembling and reassembling, which had to be done blindfolded, there was shooting of all kinds, all day and every day: skeet shooting, shooting from a truck as it traveled a circuitous route, and machine-gun shooting , as an actual rear gunner from A-6 aircraft, where you were in an Coming in Low under the Clouds • Francis Dymnicki U.S. Army Air Force With his B-26 crew, Francis stands second from right Coming in Low under the Clouds: Francis Dymnicki 23 open cockpit behind the pilot, an experience similar to that of a World War I gunner. That course completed, I was shipped to Barksdale Field, Louisiana , for assignment as a crew member on a B-26 Marauder bomber. There were six men to a crew: pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, navigator, engineer, and a radioman who also served as a waist gunner—all good men. They came from various parts of the country. The B-26 was a medium bomber used in both the European and the Pacific Theaters. It had the best mission-survival experience of any of the combat aircraft, but it required an experienced pilot to get it off and back onto the ground in one piece. It was considered to be a “hot ship” and, as with many other types of World War II aircraft, was often referred to as “the flying prostitute” because it was said that it had no visible means of air support. It made up for this apparent lack of support by its speed. B-17s took off at 70 miles per hour, but B-26s had to get up to 120 m.p.h., which made it difficult to control on take-off and landing. At Tampa Bay airfield, where the runway ran to the water’s edge, the story was, “two a day at Tampa Bay.” High attrition during training at Barksdale was due to the fact that green pilots were at the controls, which greatly contributed to the frequency of crashes. From Barksdale to Stone When we finished training at Barksdale Field, we were deemed qualified to fly to Europe. We were picked up by Air Transport in Homestead Field, Florida. Our first leg was to Cuba, where I picked up a case of bourbon for the munificent sum of $32. My idea was that we could celebrate successful landings each step of the way—which would take us to Brazil, then over the Atlantic to Africa, and finally up the coast to England. From Cuba, the next destination was Recife, Brazil, located where the South American continent projects farthest east into the Atlantic Ocean. We slept under netting and were too exhausted to do more than tumble into bed at night. After Brazil, the next leg of the journey was to the island of Ascension —a tiny speck of land close to Africa. It was a hairy trip, and although we had gas tanks in the bomb bay where we would have carried bombs on a combat mission, the possibility of running out of gas 24 World War II Remembered while over the Atlantic was worrisome. But we had a good navigator and we made it. After flying to Liberia and Morocco, we reached our final destination . It was night when we landed at an Air Force base in Stone, southern England. Stone was a large munitions depot staffed mostly by women. Great Britain was drafting women into military service and placing them anywhere they were needed for the war effort. My bombardier crewmate and I thought we would investigate Stone and found our way to a hall full of dancers—90% of them...