The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (15 page)

The 456th Bomb Group had confiscated an old farm building to use as headquarters. There were two brick buildings used as air crew briefing rooms and navigators’ and bombardiers’ study rooms.

The 455th Bomb Group had its headquarters on the other side of the runway. It had been part of a nobleman’s estate but was sadly neglected. Group headquarters was located in a farm animal stable, which was also used for briefing the crews for the combat missions. The building, made of stone with no windows, had sunk into the ground. The men had to clean out manure that had been accumulating for years, and fight off the fleas as they were working. The briefing room was later also used as a movie theater.

Lanford, commanding the 741st, won the right to a barn in a coin flip with the commander of the 743rd. It had two big bays and an aviary on top. Next to it was a small storage building, which went to the 743rd. For the 741st, Lanford made an officers club in one of the bays and an airmen’s club out of the other, “after clearing out tons of junk.” In the aviary, Lanford knocked off the bird perches and sealed the holes and cleaned up the interior, painted it, and built a ladder to climb up to it. The aviary thus became the quarters for Lanford and five other officers.

At first, the enlisted men in the 741st slept in the big plywood boxes that lined the bomb bays in which baggage was placed in the B-24s for the flight over to Italy. “You can’t imagine those living conditions,” Lanford said. The only tent was used as a mess tent. The men had to stand in line to have their mess kit filled, and when it rained, as it often did, they had to run for cover.  Lanford hired local labor to put up a mess hall made of stone. In the process, he learned that one of the residents was reporting on what went on at the airfield to the Germans. One night during construction, the German propaganda broadcaster nicknamed Axis Sally by the Americans - who liked to listen to her program because she played American music - said, “We see you down there, 741st Squadron, building your mess hall. You’ll never get to use it, we’ll bomb it before it’s complete.” The Germans never did bomb it. (The base was defended by a British antiaircraft gun crew, as Cerignola was in the British Eighth Army area.)8 Axis Sally seemed to know everything. Radio operator Sgt. Robert Hammer was in the 742nd Squadron. Once in the spring of 1944 his squadron, nicknamed the “Checkerboards” because of their tail insignia, was on a mission when two ME 109s went after a straggler that had lost an engine. The pilot of the bomber ordered the crew to lower the landing gear as a sign of surrender. The ME 109s came in close to escort the B-24 to a landing field, one off each wing. The pilot told the crew to open fire. They knocked both fighters down and the pilot returned to base safely. That night, Axis Sally declared that the Checkerboard B-24s would thereafter be the top priority of the German fighters. The squadron changed its insignia several times, but the Germans kept after it. Hammer said that the Germans had “fantastic intelligence reports. Berlin radio would tell us where we were going even before we got off the ground.”9 In early 1944, Lt. Robert Capps arrived to join the 744th Squadron. “We were deposited on bare, damp ground in olive groves. We were instructed to pitch tents on the hard, moist ground like Boy Scouts. The olive groves became muddy quagmires from rain mixed with human activity.”10 The men anchored the pyramidal tents by ropes attached to the olive trees. There was one tent for the three or four officers and another for the six enlisted men, side by side. They slept on fold-up cots with either two wool blankets or a sleeping bag for cover. The men made mattresses by packing straw into cloth mattress covers, but the straw had insects in it, which led to bites.

If a man touched the inside of the tent while it was raining, the tent leaked.  It was cold - it snowed more than once in the winter of 1944-1945 - so the inhabitants applied a bit of Yankee ingenuity by rigging a stove from a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, cut in half. The fuel was gasoline, fed into the stove through a makeshift plumbing device from another, full drum outside. It was a drip-by-drip method. The men cut a little door at the bottom of the stove for ventilation. If the stove got too hot it burned too high and soot would build up in the smokestack and ignite, sending hot sparks out the chimney, then down onto the tent. The holes caused other leaks.  The floor was mud. To make it livable, the men would build a concrete floor, assisted by hired Italian labor. First they put down crushed rock, then topped it with a layer of concrete. Bill Rounds, who shared a tent with McGovern and Sam Adams, wrote in his diary, “We sleep in tents, no lights or running water.” Soon there were lights - a single bulb hanging in the center - and by December 4, 1944, Rounds could write in his diary, “Our tent is now in good shape - good stove - clothes rack and front door.”11 McGovern, Rounds, and Adams’s tent was located near two of the more elaborate tents that were occupied by veterans who were close to the end of the thirty-five missions required to go home. McGovern met one of the pilots for the first time when he and Rounds went for a joy ride in a “liberated” jeep. Rounds was driving, at high speed. He flew down the “street” between the tents, turned a corner on two wheels, caught one of the ropes from the veterans’ tent, and the ensuing rip tore the tent in half. The stove, uniforms on hangers, shelves of books, magazines, and photographs, all flew into the olive grove. Climbing out of the jeep, McGovern saw an aging pilot “with heavy circles under his eyes who had to be at least twenty-five” walking over to the vehicle. His name, McGovern found out later, was Capt. Howard Surbeck. His voice quaking with rage, Surbeck said, “You two sons-of-bitches will never make it through combat. I should kill you right now.” Rounds and McGovern spent the rest of the day putting up a new tent for him. “So,” McGovern recalled with a laugh, “that’s the way I broke into the 741st Squadron area.”12 Rounds was nonetheless unstoppable in his practical jokes. One night shortly after the incident with the jeep he rolled a fifty-five-gallon drum of fuel oil into the middle of the squadron area, set it on fire, and shouted, “Enemy raid!” There were cries of panic and anguish all around, except from Rounds, who was laughing.

Adams was different, a capable, highly conscientious technician. He wanted only to do his part in winning the war, then get back to Milwaukee as quickly as possible to begin his studies to become a minister. He and McGovern talked, almost always it seemed, about everything. Adams spent what idle hours he had writing long letters home, cleaning his equipment, reading, or simply lying on his cot, thinking. McGovern also did a lot of reading and writing letters to Eleanor. After he began flying in combat, he always put in a number, which seemed innocent enough to the censors, but each one was the number of missions he had flown. Eleanor knew that thirty-five was the magic number - when George had completed thirty-five missions he could come home.  Those who arrived in the summer or fall of 1944 were assigned to tents already in place. This had its good points, but one notable drawback as well.  Frequently, the tent had belonged to a crew that had been shot down. When pilot Lt. Donald Kay of the 465th Bomb Group arrived in Cerignola, he heard those who were already there call out, “You’ll be sorry!” He and his crew took over the tents that had been those of a Lieutenant Greenwood and his crew, who had been shot down two days before Kay’s arrival.13 The food may have been the envy of the people of Cerignola, but it was never close to the standards the Yanks were accustomed to eating. Powdered eggs were the breakfast staple, served in various forms, often scrambled. But no matter what was done with the eggs, most of them ended up in the garbage can. There were pancakes, made from flour and the powdered eggs. They looked like and had the consistency of a Frisbee. The Army-issued “tropical butter” was treated to prevent spoilage under any imaginable circumstance, so it was too hard to melt, no matter what was tried. The bread was fresh, baked on the site by the cooks, but it was coarse and suitable only for French toast - again made with powdered eggs. Sometimes there was oatmeal, but it was on the rubbery side and Lieutenant Pepin of the 741st was convinced “that what wasn’t consumed was used to repair the planes, as it was gooey and sticky enough to be useful.”14 At noon and in the evening, there was canned food - stewed prunes, hash heated in garbage cans, and meat, which was mostly Spam, called “mystery meat.” Like nearly every serviceman in the armed forces of the United States, the AAF men at Cerignola came to hate the sight of Spam. This was true even at the very top.  After the war, General Eisenhower met the president of the Hormel company and thanked him for the Spam, then added, with a grin, “But did you have to send us so much of it?” One writer in the 455th-calling himself “Anon” - commented: “For breakfast the cooks will fry it. At dinner it is baked. For supper they have it paddy caked. Next morning it’s with flapjacks. Where the hell do they get it all, they must order it by kegs! . . . SPAM in stew. SPAM in pies, and SPAM in boiling grease!”15 At Cerignola, the alternative to Spam was canned Vienna sausages. After a month of eating them, one of the men tacked a proposal on the squadron ready-room door, offering to stop bombing Vienna if its people would stop sending their sausages.16 Lieutenant Shostack had flown 2,500 cases of K rations in his B-24 to Cerignola, and had discovered that nobody wanted it. So he put the cases into his tent and whenever he could he would take ten boxes of them into town, go to what passed for a restaurant, “and trade them for an Italian spaghetti dinner.” The spaghetti sauce had no meat in it “but the Italians had great tomato sauce and a bottle of cheap wine to go with the meal.”17 Whenever weather prevented a mission, which happened often, some of the men would try to break the monotony at the base by going into town. The AAF sent in a truck every half hour or so, which would then wait at an intersection so guys going back had a ride. There was a Red Cross club across the street from the cathedral, with a movie theater for the Americans, a pool table, books, and cards.18 The men had ample money. They were paid in Allied military currency, which at one penny to the lira was the legal tender for occupied Italy. The exchange rate was more than favorable. Skilled Italian laborers, those who helped put in the concrete floors or worked on the runway or elsewhere, were paid 75 lira a day.  Unskilled laborers received 50 lira a day. A haircut in town was 7 lira. A shave cost the same. To the initial surprise of the Yanks, there were barbers all along the streets, usually small boys with straight razors. Lt. Donald Currier noted that “as poor as the people were, many of the Italian old men went to the barber for their shave every day. It was a male ritual.” For a hot bath - unavailable at the base - the men went to a public bath in Cerignola. They brought their own soap and towel. The cost was 25 lira.19 Another surprise to the Yanks: the residents of Cerignola wore, mostly, only black clothes. The poverty of the people precluded bright, colorful clothes.  Many of them were starving, or nearly so. “We watched the women standing in long lines with their pieces of cloth,” Currier wrote, “waiting for their small allotment of flour.” The flour came from the American supplies. Hard to imagine - flour coming from the States to the Romans’ land of cereal, where Hannibal had had his supply base. Currier also noted that on the roofs of ancient houses there were bundles of twigs and small branches. “This was the fuel they cooked with.” The AAF men would bring their laundry into town, where for a few lira the local women would wash it and hang it out to dry, then fold it.20 Lieutenant Pepin went into Cerignola frequently. There he had met a teenage girl named Maria, “cute and dark-eyed.” He overcame his inability to speak Italian by using his high school French. Maria also had learned some French in school. He recalled that “the customary way of the Italians required the meeting of the family as a prerequisite to any form of social contact.” Maria lived with her grandmother, mother, and two aunts. All the men of the family had died in the war. “The women accepted me, but I doubt if they ever trusted me. Maria and I were never alone for more than a few moments. A fleeting kiss now and then was permissible, but nothing else.”

For Pepin, the friendship of the family and his visiting in their home “became very important to me. It offset the inhumane rigors of war and added gentleness to my life.” He wrote his own mother about Maria. She sent him packages of women’s clothing. Maria and her family “were overjoyed and honored me with great meals.” But, Pepin added regretfully, “I won no free time with Maria.”21 Sgarro Ruggiero, a thirty-year-old who had been in and gotten out of the Italian army, worked at the airfield. One day he brought an American pilot to his home for a lunch made by his mother. She served pasta, with no meat, no cheese, no tomato sauce. Still the pasta was homemade and the wheat was homegrown, and the American ate it with gusto. Ruggiero’s mother said, “If there were meat, it would be better. It would be ragu.” The next day, an American truck pulled up outside her home. The driver unloaded 100 tins of meat - chicken breast, beef, bacon, and the inevitable Spam. Ruggiero said the Americans “brought richness to us.”22 Sgt. Joseph Maloney, twenty years old, was a tail gunner on his B-24, in the 415th Squadron, 98th Bomb Group, based near Cerignola. A child of the Depression, Joe knew hard times. He found a nine-year-old Italian boy named Gino who would come every week to clean his tent, and he paid far above the going rate for it just to help out the boy’s family. Gino’s mother did his laundry in return for a cake of soap. Gino also supplied him with fresh eggs on occasion, for which Joe paid him two packs of American cigarettes.23 Sgt. Anthony Picardi of the 742nd Squadron got to visit Volturara Irpina, the village where his mother, father, and oldest sister were born. “As we arrived in the village square, people were pointing and asking questions:’Sono Americani?’ [’Are you American?’] I answered back yes in Italian. They ran off to seek my relatives to tell them that I had arrived from America. I never knew I had so many relatives in Italy. I met my uncle, aunt, and cousins. Everyone was happy, hugging and kissing. I met my grandmother, who was ninety years old at the time.  That was the first and last time I would ever see her. She embraced me and said,’Figio mio.’ [’My son.’] It was a very emotional moment. I could not for the love of me figure out how she recognized me. She said I had my father’s face and she knew immediately who I was.” Picardi handed out gifts - candy, sugar, coffee, cigarettes, and more. He had saved the items from his purchases at the PX for the occasion.24 Francesco Musto was born in Cerignola in 1928, the oldest of what became a family of nine children. His father was a skilled electrician, but his house had no running water - his mother bought the water in containers brought to her from the town fountain by small boys. After 1939, there was no salt at all, no sugar for months, and often no milk. As a boy, Musto would ride his bike for ten kilometers to a farm to get a bit of milk for his one-year-old sister. In his memory, the townspeople had little or no contact with the German occupiers of Italy and nothing the Germans did impressed them. The Americans, however, “opened our minds in an incredible way.” Musto recalls that when the AAF came, “I can remember that for three weeks - three full weeks - on the road outside our house for twenty-four hours a day we had a continuous flow of everything, trucks, jeeps, tanks, amphibious vehicles, everything.” Then in just a few days the Americans built their airfield. They put up their tents, made the briefing room and headquarters building, and more. They threw away a lot. Musto managed to salvage a radio and other items. “So I discovered an entire world of new products, technologies, services.” On the radio, his listened to “something I never had heard before,” the music of Glenn Miller. Like everyone else, he loved it.