The Tour Takes Its Toll
OVER TIME, THE flight surgeons and psychiatrists charged with evaluating the Eighth’s combat crews believed they had identified three phases of a crew’s response to combat. The first usually coincided with the first five missions a crew had to fly, when the men were either overly self-assured or “mouse-quiet,” asked too many questions or none at all, and were susceptible to jibes from veteran crews who had already “seen it all.” For Hullar’s crew, this phase never took root. With First Schweinfurt as their second operation, they were instant combat veterans who had won the immediate respect of their peers.
Merlin Miller remembers that “Shortly after we arrived at Molesworth, a couple of fellows from another crew told us we weren’t going to make it through our tour. When we came back from Schweinfurt that day, those same fellows came up to us and said, ‘If anyone makes it, you guys will.’”
The second period, lasting through the 10th raid, was the one in which fear was openly acknowledged and accepted. Here Hullar’s crew conformed to the norm. The Münster raid was the crew’s 10th, of which Elmer Brown wrote “We were all so scared.”
Paradoxically, it was on the home stretch, when the medical profile indicated that the crew should all be “effective, careful fighting men, quiet and cool on the ground and in the air,” that the stress of the missions came to a head. The subject is a sensitive one even now, but two men on the crew have decided to share the way in which the critical question “Can I continue?” was answered for them.
For George Hoyt the question had been brewing a long time. It came into the open after the Christmas Eve attack on Vacqueriette. As Miller explains:
“We all knew he was having trouble. You could tell it from the way he called out fighters on the intercom. We tried to help him, especially Rice, but I never realized how serious his situation was.”
As Hoyt tells it, the problem was reaching its height during the crew’s last mission to Bremen, on December 16, 1943: “I remember climbing aboard the airplane with a high fever from a bad case of the flu. It was a real double whammy. I hung on somehow and performed my duties, including a series of ‘on target’ fixes, and headings to get us back in the thick weather. But I was losing weight and felt nervous and weak.
“Dale Rice and Charlie Baggs became aware of my failing condition, and ‘Dr.’ Baggs prescribed two aspirin at bedtime and a double shot of brandy. I lived with this prescription—and that bottle of brandy under my bed—until our next raid against the buzz bomb site in France on Christmas Eve.
“I was still feeling bad, and as we got into the plane, I remember Dale saying, encouragingly, ‘The oxygen will help to knock it out.’ I made it, but I was afraid of having to go on sick call, for I knew it would mean two or three weeks in the hospital, and that I would miss some of the missions with my crew. So I decided to try to hang in there.
“I felt all of us were keyed up and under a lot of stress during this period, and to let off steam one night, when the weather had everything socked in and we were sure we wouldn’t be flying next day, we hung one on of historic proportions.
“We—meaning Dale, Charlie Baggs, Bill Watts, and me (I don’t think Merlin was along, he was always quite cool, quiet, and well behaved)—sneaked off the base without passes to one of the pubs in the local villages. Here we embarked on a rip-roaring drunk that would have absolutely appalled Bob Hullar. We got back on the base with the help of an RAF recon car driver who literally charged the gate in his vehicle, and to top the evening off, Bill Watts and I engaged in a hog-calling contest in the middle of the squadron area at about 1:00 A.M. We could have raised the dead with the noise we were making.
“It all caught up with me just days before our next mission—to Kiel—on January 4,1944. Bob Hullar came to me and asked me to visit our squadron flight surgeon. So I went to his office for a 10:00 A.M. appointment, and he gave me a full ‘64’ flight physical. When he was finished I walked back to his office in my olive drab GI undershorts and stood in front of his desk, nervously waiting to hear what his diagnosis was. My heart was pounding and I was very much on edge.
“He stared a long time at my physical exam form, and then he looked at me and spoke very slowly.
“He said, ‘You are badly exhausted physically, and your weight has taken a nose dive. I am going to recommend that you be sent back to the States. You can be part of a War Bond Drive crew. You have done your part here. You have 21 missions completed, and that’s an outstanding achievement in this theater of operations. What do you say to that?’
“I was horrified. His words hit me right in the pit of my stomach. The whole idea was incredible! Never in my life had I ever given up on anything I had attempted. This went against everything I felt was important—the sense of duty which was so forcefully instilled in me by my parents, the discipline I had at the academy where I attended high school, the superlative training that I received in the Air Force—everything.
“I was desperate. It was a desperation as great as any I have ever felt. I knew in my heart that I could never accept this and feel the same about myself again. It was one of the great turning points of my life. So I let it all hang out. I strode up and down the room in front of his desk telling the doctor again and again that I would never consent to his suggestion. I can recall saying that I would complete my tour of missions even if I had to stow away on the plane. I even banged my fist on his desk to emphasize my point. I went on and on until I had exhausted myself, and the doctor just sat there and stared at me wide-eyed. It was the most impassioned speech I ever gave.
“After I was all run down, the doctor rose slowly from his desk, and I began to wonder if he was going to have me court-martialed for gross insubordination. But he put his hand out to me across his desk as I stood there in my GI undershorts.
“He said, ‘Son, go back to your crew and complete your missions. I had no idea what this all meant to you. Good luck, and God bless you.’ And he strode out of the room with tears in his eyes.”
Elmer Brown had a very different encounter with the Squadron flight surgeon, which he recalls this way:
“After I had flown about 20 missions, right about the time of that mission I went on to Bremen on December 20, 1943,1 experienced two incidences of memory failure. In the first one, I couldn’t find my bicycle. I reported that it was missing to the Military Police, and they located the bike in an area of the Base that I seldom went to. Forty years later I can’t recall the details, but when I learned all the facts I was convinced that I should have known where the bike was parked. But I could not remember anything about it.
“The second incident occurred when we were swinging a compass on an airplane. I looked at my wrist to see what time it was, and my watch was missing. A watch is a navigator’s most important instrument, so I was very much disturbed when I couldn’t find it. I expressed my distress to the other members of the crew that were present, and Dale Rice said, ‘I have your watch.’ He had wanted to time something, so I had loaned him the watch. It had only been a short time, an hour, that he had borrowed it. But again, I could not remember having loaned it to him.
“It was expected that I would be a lead navigator in the rest of the missions I had to fly, and this could mean a Group lead, a Wing lead, a Division lead, or even the first plane of the Eighth Air Force to go on a mission. In any of these lead positions the safety of hundreds of airmen rested on the lead navigator’s performance. I remembered the mission to Münster, when we were supposed to fly north of and parallel to the Ruhr, ‘Happy Valley,’ but because of the lead navigator’s error, we flew directly over Happy Valley for several miles, and the flak was the thickest I had ever seen.
“The success of hitting the target with hundreds of tons of bombs was also dependent on the lead navigator’s ability to direct the formation to the IP and the target area on the correct heading. The lead navigator had to be very accurate in all his readings of instruments and in making his calculations and data interpretations. He had to plot all the courses, headings, winds, and other information on his maps. He had to exercise good judgment in every decision that he made. It followed that a lead navigator had to have a good memory.
“Not saying anything to my crew, when the opportunity presented itself, I slipped away and went to see the Squadron flight surgeon. I told him that on two occasions my memory had failed me. I told him exactly what had happened to me on these two occasions. I assured him that I was not one of these guys that was trying to get out of flying combat. I enjoyed the idea of flying lead navigator, because he was the one who was telling everyone where to go instead of being the guy in the back of the formation who told everyone where the lead navigator was taking them.
“I felt it was much more fun and challenging being lead navigator, and that the lead ship had better protection, surrounded by the firepower of all the other ships in the formation. But I also felt that I would be remiss if I didn’t tell someone about my problem, in case they wanted to relieve me of the duties of flying lead navigator.
“The doctor said that there was nothing he could do for me. He said that the two experiences I told him about did not warrant any change in my duties. And tears came to his eyes when he said this. He also said that I should come back if I had any more bad experiences, but I left it at that.”
The strain also affected other members of Hullar’s crew. Miller explains:
“Rice and I went to Liverpool one time to visit his brother up there. His brother, Charlie, was with some Army transportation unit. We stayed in a hotel that had been turned into a Red Cross Club. The three of us were in one room, which had one single and a double bunk, over and under. Charlie had an overnight pass, and the three of us went to a pub someplace and had a few beers. We went back to the room and Charlie slept in the upper bunk. When we woke up the next morning, he looked a little bit bleary-eyed.
The two of us said, ‘What’s the matter, didn’t you sleep good last night?’
“He said, ‘Hell, no. You guys flew a combat mission all night.’
“I asked him, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t remember dreaming that night at all, and Dale said he didn’t either. Both of us said we slept pretty good.
“Charlie said, ‘Maybe you did, but you guys were calling out fighters and talking to each other all night. You’d call out a fighter, and Dale would yell, “I see him. I see him. Get on him, mother,” and pretty soon he would call out one and you’d talk back. That went on almost all night, and I never did get any sleep.’”
It was an evening Charles Rice still remembers: “They were literally reliving their missions. When you’re asleep you can hear things going on that may not wake you up, but they are nevertheless things you can react to. And this was exactly what was happening to them. When they first woke me up I thought immediately, ‘They’re flying one of their missions.’ This is the sort of thing you read about in books, the terror of it all. But in my opinion it wasn’t so much a question of terror as alertness to the danger.
“I remember another incident where the three of us were riding on a train in England somewhere. The English trains had these little coaches in the cars where six people could sit, three on one side and three on the other, facing each other between a little aisle, with baggage racks right over their heads. We were all sitting together, and another train shot past us on the track, just like that. Both of them jumped up and hit their heads on the baggage rack. That’s how tense they still were from what they were going through.
“This was what was keeping them alive, being able to react instantly, trying to do something to protect themselves and their crew, because things happen so fast in combat.”
Charles Rice has real authority to speak of such things; he lived them himself. After Hullar’s crew finished their 25 missions he followed in his brother’s footsteps, wrangling a transfer to the 303rd and flying a 35-mission tour in 1944.
Merlin Miller remembers another evening when “Sammy went to bed early while the rest of us were playing cards. All of a sudden he sat up in his bed, yelled ‘Fighters!’, made a complete turn, and fell off the bed on his head.”
As Norman Sampson recollects, however, “The stress of combat did not seem to affect me at the time of the missions. But on the way home, on the boat, I was playing cards and my hands began to shake. I had a hard time hanging onto a glass of water. My hair began to come out by the combfuls, also. My hands still tremble sometimes, but I have all my hair back now.”
Rough as it was, all the men of Hullar’s crew flew their missions without a single “personnel failure,” the cryptic reference in the Group’s records to a bomber turning back due to a physical or other handicap in one of its crew.
But as Bob Hullar indicated to Lt. Rawlings that morning in the mess hall, the missions didn’t get any easier the more you flew. And while the crew now had only four more to go, their next two were to show how long the odds still were against completing their tour.