Three days later on December 20, the morning’s briefing replayed in Jim’s mind at 26,000 feet:
“Target today: Bremen, the second-largest port in Germany. Bremen has been hit multiple times: November 24, November 26, December 13, December 16. And we will bomb it today. The First Bomb Division will hit it with 225 planes. The Third will hit it with 182. Then we will hit it with 127. That’s a total of 534 planes hitting Bremen in thirty minutes. We will look for the marshalling yards in the northern part of the city. We will look for the Deschimag Shipyard, one of the largest shipbuilding yards in Germany. We will look for Deutsche Vacuum Oil refinery. In the southern sector of the city we will look for the Focke-Wulf Aircraft Company.”
Jim’s second mission was the first for the crew of the Lady Shamrock, piloted by Bill Conley, one of the squadron’s best fliers. Stewart again sat right seat as the copilot and the mission’s group commander, and both Jim and Bill had to fold themselves into the cockpit, Bill as rail thin as Jim if not quite as tall, but both of them knowing they would be sore as hell in eight hours or so. They would fly even higher today than on the first mission, cruising at 26,000, if you could call it cruising. Jim’s pilots were returning from missions telling him—and he was learning this himself—that above about 18,000 feet the B-24 became noticeably harder to control, calling for a lot more muscle and exertion from the pilots. And here was Lady Shamrock this moment at 26,000 with Conley working like the devil to fly straight and level, and Jim spelling him often.
The air was thin and deadly cold, and the oxygen mask was chafing Stewart’s face. Ross Curtis, the Station 124 weather officer, had warned in briefing that at this altitude the air temperature would be minus forty or below and to keep skin covered at all times. Now, ice kept growing around Stewart’s mask, and he kept feeling for it and breaking it away. Frost painted the edges of the windows. Conley’s eyebrows were white with ice and a white icicle grew down his chest as he sat in the pilot seat and flew the ship. The farther they proceeded into Germany, the more Conley grew tinged in white. Jim looked down; he was frost-covered as well, despite the current flowing inside his flight suit.
As intense as Kiel had been, that mission had also been a cakewalk. But Jim knew that Bremen would be different because of what he had learned after the 445th returned from there days earlier on December 16. Their ships were shot up, their faces frostbitten and shell-shocked. He had watched them retreat silently to their bunks and sleep twelve hours in exhaustion; some hadn’t even stopped for the customary shot of whiskey and some chow.
Bremen wasn’t far into Germany, but the city was well defended with fighters and anti-aircraft batteries. Battle damage from the sixteenth made that clear. To the south out the starboard window, they could see the smoke screen over the port of Emden, obscuring the city and rising miles into the morning sky. Then flak came up from batteries just east of the Zuiderzee and zipped up to 26,000 feet and cracked and snapped like whips about them, jostling the ship and pinging against the fuselage. The smell of cordite choked Jim and filled his lungs. A hailstorm of metal bits from flak burst as the formation made a sun-drenched target in cloudless skies of gleaming topaz blue as high noon drew near. By now, after two missions, the men knew flak all too well and wore their flak jackets; most wore steel pot helmets, and some sat on spare flak jackets to protect against shrapnel punching up through the fuselage.
Jim grew distracted by a formation of P-47 Thunderbolts gliding past to starboard and another formation to port. The Thunderbolt was a squat, dynamic American fighter bomber affectionately nicknamed the Jug. Four ships stacked together in each formation floated effortlessly past, guarding the B-24 group trudging toward Bremen. He found it deeply comforting to have them on guard, and in fact it was peaceful up here, like Clover Field way back when: peace and the bright sun and topaz blue.
The 445th crossed the Ems River, and in another few minutes the P-47s began to peel off to head back toward home and a fresh batch of fuel. He knew to watch for fighters now; he told the crew to be alert.
In another moment Stewart heard Steinhauer’s voice: “We’re on the I.P.,” said the navigator.
Conley turned over control of the ship to Rankin while Stewart ordered Wilson to fire yellow-yellow flares to signal to the group that they had reached the initial point of the bomb run.
“I can’t find any flares, sir,” said Wilson, the radioman.
Stewart was about to demand to know why there were no flares on Lady Shamrock when Tech. Sgt. Harold “Eck” Eckelberry, the engineer, rushed up behind the pilots on the flight deck. His oxygen mask was plugged into a walking-around bottle. He pulled away his mask long enough to shout to all at the top of his voice above the roar of the engines, “We’ve got a supercharger out. Frozen. And my interphone mic is dead.” With that he hurried back to the top turret.
Flying behind Jim in ship 579, Paper Doll, navigator Wright Lee later recounted, “As we passed the I.P. about ten miles from Bremen, the flak barrage peaked, not quite the quantity of the first Bremen mission, but more accurate and intense. My hands and feet were so cold that at times I could not feel them. My hands warmed up as I rubbed them, but my feet remained lifeless with no feeling whatsoever.”
As quickly as the flak barrage began, it ended, and the sky grew clear on a perfect day for flying. Far below, four miles down, western Germany showed lush and green even in December. It didn’t look real, all that green below. It looked like a painting.
“Fighters, ten o’clock!” came the call from somewhere aft. Jim strained to look out the window. With his oxygen mask on, goggles pulled down, interphone, and flight suit plugged in, he couldn’t move much and he could see nothing. Then he heard, “Fighters all around!”
“Ship going down! Ship going down!” said a frantic voice from another plane.
“I think it’s Good Nuff !”
Jim tried to think. Good Nuff—whose ship was that? Buck Patterson’s from the 700? Jim thought back to the chalkboard from briefing. Patterson was in the high squadron behind Jim.
“I see chutes!” called a voice. “Four…five…six. Six chutes.” There, survivors. Maybe they could make it back to England somehow, but dropping into Germany was bad business.
More chatter on the radio. “Awalt’s ship got it in the cockpit. Still flying.” Damn it. Awalt was a good pilot—Jim hoped he could keep his plane in the air. Another ship reported guns frozen and inoperative. Sounded like Chick Torpey reporting; how the hell could the ships cover each other with frozen guns? Ralph Stimmel said they were seeing rockets fired from a German Ju 88. God, the sky was full of bandits. Jim saw Bf 109s and Me 110s swoop past from two o’clock and zip through the formation. Such a powerless feeling all of a sudden.
The running battle between the Liberators and the Luftwaffe continued as the group charged to target, and suddenly the P-47s reappeared in waves of four. Jim heard reports on the interphone; although low on fuel, the Jugs had turned around when they saw the group jumped. Conley and Stewart watched a Thunderbolt streak diagonally down across their line of vision with a Bf 109 on its tail. They had passed from view before Jim could see the outcome but he heard that the P-47 had been hit and was going down.
A moment later the Jugs had swept the sky clear of enemy fighters.
“Bremen smoke screen dead ahead,” said Rankin. The vast urban area of Bremen sprawled before Jim with smoke pots dotting the near edges of the city at even points. A little further in were ragged fires from strikes by the First and Third Divisions, with all that black smoke dirtying the air even to 26,000 and obscuring much of the landscape.
The 445th approached the target at 230 miles per hour, with everything happening so fast on the bomb run. Way too fast. Jim couldn’t see any enemy fighters, and the chatter on his headset had quieted.
The flak barrage resumed, bursting all about and right at their altitude. The ship would spasm every time a blast came close. Rankin had control through his bombsight; Conley would have done better if he had been able to muscle the controls, but it was Rankin’s ship for another couple of minutes.
Lady Shamrock lumbered through the edge of the smoke screen, and the turbulence rocked them. Now and then, Stewart could still see entire blocks burning far below and smell burning wood, even up that high. Conley looked for the lead Pathfinder ships that would be dropping red smoke markers with their load to signal bombs away. No such flares could be seen.
“Can you see flares?” Rankin asked from down below in the nose to the pilot and copilot above him.
“Negative,” said Conley.
“I’ve got a manufacturing plant coming up,” said Rankin. The smoke below was thick now; Jim wondered how Rankin could see anything.
“No flares visible,” said Conley. “You call the shot.”
In a few more seconds Rankin said, “Bombs away.”
Jim said into his throat mic, “Wilson, fire red-red to signal bombs away.”
“Can’t find any red flares either, sir,” said Wilson, whom the men called “Pappy.” It was a matter to be resolved at another time and place, but Jim already knew that if they made it home, he wouldn’t come down too hard on Wilson for forgetting flares on his first mission; he would do better next time.
As Stewart thought this through, the ship resounded with a series of clicks and clacks, very loud, even above the headsets, and the men could feel each bomb letting go by electronic release, entrained over the target, a mixed load of 100-pound incendiaries and 500-pound general-purpose bombs. Click, click, click, click. Every few seconds more bombs let loose, and as each left the ship, she leapt higher in the sky, relieved of all that weight. Jim could feel it, and his urge was to grab the wheel and compensate.
“Bombs clear,” said Pappy Wilson.
Conley switched control back from Rankin and banked hard to starboard. With the right side dipped low in hazy skies, Jim could see their bombs hitting the southern portions of Bremen five miles below; bright and violent orange flashes as those big bombs and incendiaries devastated the area near the factory Rankin had spotted.
Conley had just leveled out the ship after completing his turn when Jim heard, “Fighters!”
He could hear and feel the top turret firing four feet above, rattling the entire ship. Then farther back the waist gunners opened up in short spasms. Thank God Lady Shamrock’s guns weren’t frozen. The gunners had been trained and trained again to fire in short bursts or they’d use up “the whole nine yards” in their belts too soon and overheat the guns for good measure. Jim couldn’t see much at first, but then yellow streaks, each an enemy fighter, zipped past from the rear, low to high, and broke left and broke right in front of the formation and were gone from view again.
The chatter continued. “109s, five o’clock.” All the action happened behind Conley and Stewart, so it was no use even straining to look. Let the gunners amidships and in the turrets do their jobs.
Conley pointed and Jim could see a yellow 190 at twelve o’clock low and a mile out closing fast, heading straight for their ship. As Conley and Stewart watched, its wing guns started flashing fire, aiming for the flight deck—a new German strategy they had been briefed on. Soon they could hear Steinhauer’s machine gun answering from the nose below. Stewart waited for bullets to punch through the windshield and hit him. It was in God’s hands now. The German plane zipped past so close over the top of the cockpit that Jim could count the rivets in her belly. He knew the Lady had been hit; no way that damn pilot could have missed. A moment later Rankin said the glass in the front turret had been punched through, but he and Steinhauer were all right.
Just in the last few minutes, with distractions constant and everyone breathing hard, ice had encrusted Conley, Stewart, and Wilson, who was sitting behind Stewart at the radio. Jim knocked at the ice grown nearly a foot below his face mask and dropped chunks of ice onto the deck. It was a miracle the guns continued to chatter.
Finally, they passed south of the smoke screen at Emden still flying at 26,000, and more flak burst around them in deadly black puffs. The powder smell filled the ship, and Conley ordered window to be dropped in bundles every few seconds. It was the first time out for the strips of aluminum meant to distract radar, and they all hoped it would do the trick and confuse those guys on the ground. Dead ahead lay the Zuiderzee and the North Sea sprawled beyond it, promising safety in just a few moments more.
The formation droned westward over the coast of Germany and Holland, then over the Frisian Islands in the North Sea and began a steady descent that had them at 10,000 and off oxygen when they reached the English coast at Cromer. Jim’s face stung when he pulled off his mask, and he looked at Conley to see deep red marks where the skin had been exposed under his eyes all those hours in the air.
Soon they were skimming the flat farmlands of East Anglia. They saw the comforting tall tower of Tibenham All Saints Church and circled while ships fired flares if they carried wounded or had been so badly damaged that landing would be a problem. Finally, they touched down on the east-west runway and Jim noted the time: 1450. There was a lot to report, a lot to improve on, and he would listen in on every crew’s interrogation by S-2—he always did. He dropped out through the bomb bay and stood to his full height for the first time since 0700 and thought of nothing but the sleep that would come as soon as he could manage it. As he climbed into the back of the truck with the rest of them, it bothered him—he had lost a plane from his formation, and a crew, and some of those boys were likely dead.
There wasn’t time to dwell on any of it. The group went up again two days later to bomb marshalling yards at Osnabrück and Münster, Germany, and Luftwaffe fighters shot two ships out of the sky and a third was crippled and crash landed back in England. None of Jim’s boys of the 703rd had been lost. Still, the squadron had its closest call yet on that December 22 mission when another Liberator had collided with Earle Metcalf’s ship, dug a hole in his wing, and bent a prop. But Earle had kept his head and stayed with the formation to complete the mission despite a gouged wing, flak, and fighters. In just nine days since the group had become operational, a grim sort of mathematics had come into play. Men were being subtracted regularly and, if not subtracted, then shaken so badly they might crack up.
Then came Christmas Eve, a rotten time to fly, and another mission came down from Division HQ. Never mind that the horrible, dark, wintry dampness of southeastern England had brought with it cold and flu season, which hit the base hard. Never mind it was Christmas Eve. At least today’s mission was voluntary for all qualified crews at Station 124.
Jim was restless as he briefed the pilots on a thirty-five-ship sortie to Bonnières, France, to bomb new military installations. Recent photos showed the construction of buildings deep in the ground and railroad spurs being laid, with camouflage going up. G-2 spoke of a new type of German rocket that would put England within reach. In all, 670 B-17s and B-24s would hit twenty-three of these strange sites near the coast. Jim wanted to fly, but it wasn’t his turn in the rotation—it fell to Gil Fisher as group assistant operations officer to serve as air commander for the third section in the formation. Fisher began with a near mutiny after someone failed to alert the Mess Hall that the boys were going up, and many of the crews didn’t get to eat at all. Then, Fisher reported to the flight line as copilot and squadron commander on Victor Smith’s ship, Gremlins Roost, which infuriated the volatile Bill Minor, the regular copilot on Smith’s crew who stood there in his flight suit and jacket and holding all his gear. The second lieutenant gave Gil Fisher an earful. After the mission, which was a success except that one ship had crash-landed back in England, Fisher told Stewart about Minor’s temper tantrum on the hardstand. “I’ll fly every mission my crew flies,” Minor had ranted. “If I’m not on the flight deck, I’ll fly in the waist as a gunner!” And that’s what Minor had done. Minor spent the five-hour mission in the waist keeping the gunners company.
It was a relief for all concerned that the Germans were even more unprepared to receive a Christmas Eve bombing mission than the Eighth Air Force was to launch one. The bad guys had taken the day off and not fired a gun or launched a fighter. If not for two Liberators from the next field over colliding in mid-air killing both crews, the day would have been perfect. Yet Minor’s insubordination gave Stewart an issue to deal with—it was laudable that Bill wanted to stick with his crew even when there wasn’t a job for him, but one didn’t mouth off to a superior officer on the flight line and in front of the crew in question. That must not be tolerated.
As Stewart considered his course of action in the matter, a knock at the door of the Site 7 quarters he shared with Fisher startled them both. It was Second Lieutenant Minor who, hat in hand, requested permission to enter. He edged inside and Fisher closed the door. “I’m sorry for what happened today, sir,” he said to Fisher. “I always speak my mind, and sometimes I shouldn’t. What I did was wrong.” Stewart stood watching; it was a nice moment. Minor glanced at Jim, saluted both officers, and departed.
The men in Stewart’s squadron knew their commander wasn’t a blood-and-guts leader; neither did they want to give him problems to deal with, so Minor sought approval and Stewart gave it without a word. Jim later said, “I was, in many ways, far happier in the service than I ever was at any time in my life. Closeness and camaraderie with all those wonderful guys. Feeling I was part of a whole, of a divine scheme, with an obligation to do my very best. I wasn’t playacting life then; I was living it.”
He had been playacting so long, but what choice did he have with a playactor father? He had kept it up until playacting became second nature and made him a natural for the stage and then the picture business. He could look back on highly dramatic roles, playing an army doctor in Of Human Hearts, or Jefferson Smith awash in letters on the Senate floor, or Macaulay Connor telling Tracy Lord about moonbeams. Except here he couldn’t read any script other than the officer’s manual, and often that didn’t help at all. Here he was forced away from his natural inclination to be a man alone who found human connections only through playacting. Now it was sink or swim, relating to men to save their lives and his own, and out there on that 20,000-foot limb, Jim found that he loved it.