Issue 19.13
In the early morning between breakfast and briefing, some of the crew members would to the Flight Surgeon and complain of not sleeping. That was the excuse but not the reason for the visit. The real reason was that pre mission anxiety had a grip on that person.
The remedy was a shot of Benzedrine. Actually Benzedrine did keep a person awake if needed but in the flak and fighter filled skies over Germany there was little danger of someone going to sleep in the very cold and noisy Flying Fortress. The real reason for the Benzedrine was to calm nerves so the crew man could perform his job.
Radio operator gunners seemed to be a little bit different than other crewmen. One radio operator on a different crew always took some comic books with him on a mission. While sitting at his desk and not busy with his radio equipment, while on the bomb run with numerous explosions sounding and rocking the bomber and with shrapnel passing through the plane’s skin, he sat and read his comic books. Our own radio operator, Wally Sanchez, while on the bomb run would shove bundles of chaff, metal strips that looked like Christmas tree tinsel, out his slot in the radio room. Up till this point, Wally never did look out of his small window to see what was going on out side. Hamburg was a very heavily defended target with 2,500 anti-aircraft cannon shooting at us from the ground. The whole group of three squadrons of bombers banked sharply to port and as we were leaving someone said “Wally, look out of your window and you can see were we just came from”. Wally looked out of his window and saw what we all saw. The black and grey puffs of the explosions from ground fire, smoke from the smoke bombs that each squadron leader drops so his entire squadron can drop also, smoke shells shot from the ground so ground fire can compensate for wind drift, exploding and burning bombers and of course the heavy persistent contrails that hundreds of bombers leave to mark their passing. We didn’t have to worry about either friendly or enemy fighters adding to that cloud. Wally groaned and we were never again aware of his looking out to see us leaving a target. Back at the barracks after a mission a friend and gunner of a sister crew said to me “Today on this mission I had a dry run”. The common definition for a “dry run” is when we do not drop our bombs and so have to make a sweeping 360 degree turn so we can go on another bomb run which everyone very much hated to do. I replied to him “We dropped our bombs on the first run so it was not a dry run”. “Oh no, I mean, this time for the first time in eight missions, I didn’t wet my pants.” Once we widely circled the city of Cologne, Germany for hours without dropping our bombs. The reason for this was that we couldn’t visually seethe railroad marshalling yards and we had explicit orders to never take a chance of bombing the huge famous Cologne Cathedral. That was the only time ever that ground fire did not come up. We were all hoping that the Germans would fire a few rounds from the ground or that a few German fighters would make a pass at us. It didn’t happen so we carried our bombs back to our base and landed with them so we didn’t get credit for a mission.