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Show With Ernie Pyle at the Front Here's How It Feels to Ride On a B-26 Bombing Rim Crews Knoiv Their Business; Morale Is Good Among British -Based Fliers By Ernie Pyle. A U- S- BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND. These are some of the boys who have been blasting out our invasion path on the continent of' Europe. For nearly a year they have been hammering at the wall of defense the Germans have thrown up. How well they have blasted we will know before the summer is over. They are a squadron of B-26 Marauder bombers. They are repre- sentative of the entire mighty weight of the tactical bombers of the Ninth air force. I have come to spend a few days with them because I wanted to get a taste of the pre-invasion assault from the air standpoint stand-point before we get a mouthful of the invasion proper from the ground. The way I happened to come to this certain squadron is one of those liv . -TCP-" '"" Ernie Pyle things. One night in London I was sitting at a table with some friends in a public house when two boys in uniform leaned over from the next table and i asked if I weren't I So-and-so. ' I said yes, whereupon we got to talking and then we got to be pals and eventually we adjourned from one place to another, as Damon Runyon would say, and kept on adjourning throughout the evening, and a good time was had by all. These boys . were B-26 bombardiers, bom-bardiers, and in the course of the evening's events they asked if I i wouldn't come and live with their squadron awhile. Being nothing if not accommodating, I said sure, why not. And here we are. The two boys were Lieuts. Lindsey Green (2360. Chestnut street), San Francisco, and Jack Arnold (603 N. Fourteenth street), East St. Louis, 111. Being redheaded, Lieutenant Arnold goes by the name of "Red Dog." They are both very nice people indeed. The boys say this is the best squadron in England. Nine out of ten squadrons, or- infantry companies, com-panies, or quartermaster battalions, will say the same thing about themselves. them-selves. It is a good omen when they talk like that. , This station seems to' me to have about the finest spirit I've run onto in our army. It is due, I think, largely to the fact that the whole organization has been made into a real team. The commander of this group is Col. Wilson R. Wood, Chico, Texas. Five years ago he was an enlisted man. Today, at 25, he is a full colonel. He is a steady, human person per-son and he has got what it takes to blend thousands of men together into a driving unit. The job of the B-26s is several-fold. several-fold. For one thing, they had to rid upper France and the Low countries coun-tries of German fighters as far as possible, to clear the way for our heavy bombers on their long trips into Germany. They have done this not so much by bombing airdromes, which can be Immediately repaired, re-paired, as by blasting the enemy's reserve supplies of planes, engines and propellers. Their second job is to disrupt the enemy's supply system. Much of their work of late has been on railroad marshalling yards, and along with A-20s and v fighter-bombers, they have succeeded suc-ceeded to a point where British papers say Germany cannot maintain a western front by rail. And third, they constantly work on the enemy's military installations along the Channel coast. They feel that they have done a good job. If they haven't I'm going to be plenty sore at them one of these days, because I might be in the vicinity vicin-ity and if there's anything that makes me sick at the stomach it's a military installation in good working order. The B-26 is a bomber which is very fast and carries a two-ton bomb load. In its early stages it had a bad name it was a "hot" plane which took great skill to fly and which killed more people in training train-ing than it did in combat. But the B-26 has lived down the bad name. The boys of this squadron squad-ron wouldn't fly in anything else. They like it because it can take quick and violent evasive action when the flak is bothersome, and because be-cause it can run pretty well from fighters. Its record over here is excellent. Bombing accuracy has been high and losses have been extremely low. And as for accidents the thing that cursed the plane in its early days they have been next to nonexistent here. The boys so convinced me of the B-26's invulnerability that I took my courage in my hand and went on a trip with them. x They got us up at 2 in the morning. Red Dog gave me an extra pair of long drawers to put on. Chief gave me his combat pants, as I had given mine away in Italy. Also I put on extra sweaters and a macki-naw. macki-naw. Then we walked through the moonlight under the trees to the mess hall. It was only 2:30 a. m., but we ate breakfast before the take-off. And we had two real fried eggs too. It was almost worth getting up for. We drove out to the field in a jeep. Some of the boys rode their bicycles. There were a couple of hundred crewman altogether. At the field we went into a big room, brightly lighted, and sat on benches for the briefing. The briefing lasted almost an hour. Everything was explained in detail how we would take off, how we would rendezvous in the dark, where we would make the turn toward our target. Then we went to the locker room and got our gear. Red Dog got me a pair of flying boots, a Mae West life preserver, a parachute and a, set of earphones. We got in the jeep again and rode out to the plane. We stood around talking with the ground crew. Finally, 10 minutes before be-fore takeoff time, we got into the plane. One of the boys boosted me up through a hatch in the bottom of the plane, for it was high, and with so many clothes I could hardly move. I sat back in the radio compartment com-partment on some parachutes for the take-off. Red Dog was the only one of the crew who put on his chute. He said I didn't need mine. We were running light, and it didn't take long to get off the ground. I had never been in a B-26 before. The engines seemed to make a terrific clatter. There were runway markers, and I could see them whiz past the windowes we roared down the runway. A flame about a foot; long shot out of the exhausts and it worried me at first, but finally I decided that was the way it was supposed sup-posed to be. At 12,000 feet up it begins to get daylight before it does on the ground, and while we could now see each other plainly in our B-26, things were still darkly Indistinct in England, Eng-land, far down there below us. Now and then a light would flash on the ground some kind of marker beacon for us. We passed over some airdromes with their runway lights still on. Far in the distance we could see one lone white light probably a window some early-rising farmer had forgotten to black out. "Red Dog" Arnold, the bombardier, bombard-ier, was sitting in the copilot's seat, since we weren't carrying a copilot. The boys got me a tin box to sit on right behind Red Dog so I could get a better view. We climbed higher, and at a certain place the whole group of B-2Gs made a turn and headed for the target. This wasn't a mission over enemy territory, and there was no danger to it. As we neared the target Red Dog crawled forward through a little opening into the nose, where the bombardier usually sits. The entire nose Is plexiglas, and you can sea straight down and all around. He motioned for me to join him. I squeezed into the tiny compartment. compart-ment. There was barely room for the two of us. The motors made less noise up there. By now daylight had come and everything below was clear and spectacular. I stayed in the nose until we were well on the way home, and then crawled back and sat in the copilot's co-pilot's seat beside Chief Collins. The sun came out, the air was smooth, and it was wonderful flying along there over England so early in the morning. |
