October 22-27, 1943
WITH THE OCTOBER 20, 1943 mission to Düren, Hullar’s crew had finished 12 of their 25 missions, and had earned a well-deserved respite from combat.
Elmer Brown recorded in his diary: “October 22-27. Went to the Rest Home in southern England,” and the enjoyment the crew had during their stay is beautifully described by Bud Klint’s own diary entry. On October 27th he wrote:
“Back home again after the most glorious four days I ever hope to experience away from home. The rest home is wonderful. I only hope we get to go back for seven more days after we have a few more missions under our belts.
“The house itself is a tremendous mansion built in 1870 by a ‘vinegar king.’ It was later turned into a hotel, then taken over by the RAF, and finally leased to the Air Corps. It is a gray stone building, and inside and out looks like something out of the movies. It is located in the most beautiful section of England I have yet seen, and the grounds of the estate, which must cover several miles, are heavily wooded.
“The Red Cross runs the place, and they have everything for amusement that you could ask for. Football, baseball, tennis, badminton, archery, cycling, horseback riding, hunting, checkers, chess, cards, pool, volleyball, and many other things. The staff is lovely. They really make you feel like guests. They do everything they can to make you comfortable and happy.
“The butler, Michael, is a typical butler. He woke us every morning at nine-thirty, once by serving us a cup of pineapple juice. There are four Red Cross hostesses there, and they couldn’t have picked better girls for the job. Our whole stay was like a glorious dream.
“The one thing that I shall probably remember best was our first morning there. We started out in a recon to watch a fox hunt. We missed the hunt and wound up on a sightseeing tour of Lady Arundel’s estate. We climbed all through the ruins of the old castle built in 800 and partially destroyed by Cromwell after Blanche Somerset, Lady Arundel the VIII, with only nine men, withstood the attacks of Cromwell’s 1500 soldiers for nine days.
“Then we went to the new castle. Lady Arundel the XV received us like we were her own children, and gave us a personally conducted tour of her home, showing us all the art treasures and historic relics therein. The new palace, built in 1750, is the most wonderful place I have ever seen. It is something like the Field Museum in Chicago. Some of the wallpaper is original. The ceilings are all beautifully painted and trimmed with gold carvings. All the doors are made of oak from boats of the Spanish Armada.
“She had numerous paintings, including portraits of all the Arundels from Lord Arundel the I to her late husband. Some of the pictures are original van Dykes. She has a bed rescued from the royal palace before Charles I was beheaded, in which he slept, and it is just as it was when he slept in it, original canopy, spreads and all. Many of the furnishings in the palace are from the old castle and are lovely antiques.
“I could write books on all the things we saw that morning: famous old books, papers, including an original letter from Queen Elizabeth I, a holy Grail, old china, et cetera, et cetera. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. There is even a complete chapel in the palace, one of the loveliest you could imagine. It is entirely Italian, and the altar alone cost 20,000 pounds. Her son, Lord Arundel the XVI, is a prisoner of war near Leipzig, and she has turned over one entire wing of her castle to refugee children. She was truly a wonderful lady.
“That was only one glorious morning of our stay, and all of it was just as amazing and wonderful. We wore civilian clothes, lounged, laughed, sang, rode, and played. We felt like human beings again instead of like automat killers. We forgot about war and its horrors for the most part.”
George Hoyt and Merlin Miller also remember their stay at the rest home. Miller recalls:
“Ours was in the same vicinity as the officers’. It was a big estate out in the country, not too far from a small town. It must have had a good 40 to 50 rooms in it. There at the rest home we could play golf, go horseback riding, shoot skeet, play tennis, shoot archery, and play softball. It was a good place just to go and relax.”
“I remember one night they had a famous English classical pianist. She played classical pieces for us, and also played a lot of requests from the GIs. There were two Red Cross girls there, one called ‘Mississippi’ because of her Southern accent. They were very nice and easy to get along with, and went out to play golf with us a number of times. Those golf matches were classics, seeing as most of us had never played golf before. I never saw anybody besides Marson hit a golf ball straight up in the air so that it came down behind him.
George Hoyt remembers the rest home as “a large stone edifice resembling a medieval castle. The building had a tall, three-story turret with a music room on the third floor. It had a record player with a good supply of classical recordings, and I spent an hour or so each day there. I love classical music, and I relished each moment.
“On one side of the manor building was a first-rate tennis court, and one day I accepted a challenge from the two Red Cross girls to play. I enjoyed it so much I played all day with only a break for lunch. It had been two or three years since I had last played and the next morning, much to my dismay, I could hardly get out of bed due to ‘charlie horses.’
“The girls were very sympathetic, and served me breakfast in bed three times! Ah, for the life of a combat crewmember! Our time there really was a great morale builder. The people at Bomber Command definitely knew what they were doing in setting these places up.”
Unfortunately, it was impossible to forget the war even at the rest home. Upon his return Bud Klint thought not only about the good times he had had, but also some other experiences the rest home provided. He concluded his diary entry on a somber note:
“I ran into Luke there. He went through cadets with me. He is at Chelveston [home of the 305th Bomb Group] and was riding in the only ship in his squadron which came back from Münster. We also met some boys from the 100th Group. Two ships from their entire Group were all that returned from Schweinfurt. Stories like these make me wonder if I’ll live through my 25. We lost 150 ships on four raids. We can’t take much more of that.”
Back at the base there were other grim reminders of the toll that even noncombat operations could take. On the second day of the Hullar crew’s stay at the rest home, Lt. L.E. Jokerst and Sgt. W.H. Stephen, his engineer, were killed along with six others in the crash of Miss Patricia, B-17F 42-29930, on a local night flight. They had flown with Major Shayler on the Düren mission, which had been their 15th.
Hullar’s crew now had 13 more missions to fly, and only time would tell how hard they would be. What the crew could not know was that the very darkest period of the Eighth’s air war was already past. The next raid would signal more of a false dawn than a definite turn of the tide, but it would demonstrate without doubt that a change for the better was on the way.
It featured something new: an escort of P-38s.