Issue 11.13
Some crew members would go to the flight surgeon and say they did not sleep the night before and could they have something to keep them awake? Can you imagine someone falling asleep with all those guns shooting at you and all holes popping in the plane?
The medic would them give him the standard remedy, some Benzedrine. The real reason for wanting Benzedrine was to calm nerves and help to control fear. Once we were airborne the
Sweating was over but when the FLAK started then fear would kick in. Fighter attacks did not cause the same level of fear probably because we were so busy and an attack did not last nearly as long so we didn’t experience the high level of fear. Radio operators seemed to be a bit different than the rest of us. The radio room had a small window by his desk and a piece of plexus-glass over head so he didn’t see very mush of what was going on out side. The radio operator was kept busy while on the bomb run by constantly shoving chaff out of a slot by his desk. This was to keep the sky filled with Christmas tree tinsel to help confuse ground radar.
One radio operator on another crew read a pile of comic books while on the bomb run. One day when our group of 36 bombers had dropped our bombs and were banking to port, Luin Lewis, our top turret gunner, said to Wally our radio operator “Look out of your window as we leave the target area and look at what we just flew through”. Wally looked and after almost fainting said “Did we fly through that mess?” He looked out and saw the black smoke that
2,500 ground guns caused shooting at us. Smoke bombs dropped by each squadron, heavy persistent contrails caused by hundreds of bombers, smoke shells fired from the ground to figure wind velocity and burning and exploding bombers going down. No one ever saw Wally look out of his window again. The nearest village to our air base was Polbrook. It had a population of about 100 people. When we went to the pub the day after a mission, they could always tell us what our losses for the previous day were. In the pre day light darkness when all 36 bombers took off in 30 second intervals, I think the whole town came outside, stood on the street and counted us out. Of course who could sleep through 144 huge engines at full throttle?
When the mission returned late that afternoon or after dark those same people lined the street again and counted us back in. They truly sweated us out. We didn’t fly every day. Weather, battle damage and then each group stood down one mission in four and each squadron stood down one mission in four. Also when there were extra crews, some would get to stand down.
When crews were in short supply which was more the case, selected crews would fly with the flying squadrons. We started our combat flying “Tour” with an assigned 25 missions but the 8th
Air Force was so short of crews that they upped the number to 35.
Once on a mission to the marshaling yards of the city of Cologne, we circled the city for a very long time. We did not have visual and we were always instructed to make sure we don’t damage the great Cologne Cathedral. This the only time we all hoped that the Germans would send a few rounds of FLAK at us or a couple of Me 109 German fighter planes would make a pass at us but no such luck.
Well they fired not a shot so we didn’t get credit for a mission for that run.