“Dear Mr. Metcalf,” Jim began. “I am writing to you to tell you about your son, Lt. Earle Metcalf, who is missing in action while serving his country in a bombing raid over France.”
Earle Metcalf was a different sort of a guy. It took all kinds to man the 445th, and Metcalf looked like a bookkeeper. Ollie Saunders, who was a bookkeeper, had been a pilot in the 703 until he was shot down December 30 and now, according to reports, was a prisoner of the Germans. Well, Metcalf looked more like a bookkeeper than the bookkeeper. He was a fine, quiet kid, and Jim never revealed Earle’s secret: This pilot in the Army Air Corps needed corrective lenses. He could do all right without them, but still, he kept them around. It was the sixth mission for Metcalf; he had flown his air-medal mission with Jim to Bonnières on January 21. Now it was nearly two weeks later and Earle was gone, the circumstances of his loss mysterious but leaving no room for hope. The ship he was piloting, Billie Babe, had vanished near the assembly point at Splasher 5 in bad weather on what should have been a milk run to the rocket coast; Billie Babe hadn’t been seen in formation heading over the Channel, the ship hadn’t returned to base or landed at any other bases, and no crash debris had been located anywhere around Norwich. She must have blown up in the air—the old Liberator fuel-leak issue—making this a group of ten difficult letters that Jim would write, counting this one to Mr. Metcalf. He couldn’t say for sure that these sons and husbands were dead, but it just didn’t look good, and he would write and sign each letter because these were his guys of the 703rd.
Jim had just received a letter from Victor Smith’s father, Vardry, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jim’s letter and Vardry’s apparently had crossed in the mail. In Smith’s letter Vardry asked Jim if the other crews had seen what happened to Gremlins Roost and if Victor was alive or dead. “My purpose is to try and force his mother to erase from her mind the firm conviction that he has been killed,” wrote Mr. Smith. “I want her to realize there is a 50/50 chance he is alive.”
Oh, the anguish of the parents, siblings, wives, and girlfriends back home. How this war did hurt, in so many ways. It hurt to fly long missions sitting in your seat for seven and eight hours at a time at twenty and thirty and forty below zero, muscling a ship that seemed to buck like a mule, a ship that seemed to hate you. It hurt to live in the raw cold of Tibenham, a place that was always damp and always chilled, so chilled in his quarters in Site 7 up north of the runways that it clawed its way in the windows of those concrete bunkers and seeped into the marrow of his bones. It hurt when he didn’t duck low enough and cracked his head on the bulkhead of the doorway or the I-beam hanging low in the ceiling. It hurt to never see the sun; fog yes, everywhere, every morning it seemed, but what he wouldn’t give for a sunny Hollywood day about now. It all hurt; hurt so bad that the men could only come to one conclusion: The weather was on the Germans’ side. How could those mired in muddy Station 124, grounded much more than half the time, think anything else? They had landed here nine miserable, soggy weeks earlier and spent every stinking day scraping mud off their boots and cleaning mud off their doorsteps, and when it wasn’t mud, it was worse—it was cow manure.
That was life in this merry little corner of England, where the strain of the bad-weather takeoffs and assemblies accumulated in the minds of pilots and copilots because they didn’t want to die and they didn’t want to kill their crews before the Germans even had a crack at them. It certainly weighed on 703rd Squadron Commander Jim Stewart when he flew in the right seat on missions, and especially when he didn’t, when he stood there just a spectator at the railing of the control tower watching the long line of Liberators along the perimeter track with propellers turning, engines revving up, war machines straining at the bit, roaring with such defiance he could feel it rattling his bones and his teeth. He would watch his pilots take off into the pea soup of East Anglia on those raw mornings when damp thirty-five degrees felt like twenty and the cold hit marrow. Sometimes, he didn’t even realize how tight he gripped that railing as each Liberator burdened with 5,000 pounds of bombs struggled to get airborne at the end of the gloomy runways.
It was February now, the weather no better and the strain worse. They had lost Metcalf and his crew on the month’s very first mission. And here in the middle of nowhere in the English countryside, temperatures remained in the thirties, those damp and unpleasant thirties, and maybe snow would have been better. At least snow would have been different and would have offered a color other than green encrusted in brown, for these were farm pastures after all, and rich ones at that.
“I’d never felt cold like it,” said Stewart. “It went right through you. It was a wet kind of cold. The fog was sometimes thick, and freezing, and wet.”
No matter what he did, Jim couldn’t get warm. He layered on the clothes, fired up the stove, wrapped himself in blankets, or in his flight suit and jacket and blankets, and nothing worked. How long was it since southern California? Months? Years? It felt like forever since he’d had to roll down the windows on his car on Sunset Boulevard or felt the heat of the morning sun in the cockpit of the Stinson. The mind was such a funny thing; he couldn’t even imagine those luxuries now.
Jim Stewart was one of 3,900 young men in Tibenham; in fact, he was one of the station’s very oldest young men. But all were boys in many ways, and boys were still boys. Any that could play ball, and that was most of them, had stuffed their baseball mitts and favorite bats in their bags for the trip over, and sat staring glumly out fogged windows as the weather forced them always indoors. When they could, they broke out baseballs and mitts and played catch in the hangar behind the control tower. They smoked cigarettes out of boredom and to keep warm. They ate chocolate until there wasn’t any more. They passed time more often bundled up with comic books over girlie magazines. King Comics were popular, featuring reprints of Flash Gordon comic strips—Jim’s favorite—along with America’s Best Comics featuring The Black Terror and Doc Strange. All manner of colorful comics were passed around the Nissen huts until they had become tatters; Action Comics with Superman, Detective Comics and Batman, Marvel Mystery Comics with Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, Captain Marvel, and the especially intriguing to young men just out of adolescence—or still trapped in it—Wonder Woman. By now a growing roster of superheroes battled the Axis month after month, just like the guys of Tibenham! In a pinch Classic Comics would do, whether Nazis died or not; there was suddenly magic in repackaging a ponderous Silas Marner or Count of Monte Cristo that had been forced reading in high school into an action-packed half-hour’s diversion from the monotony of life at Station 124 on non-flying days.
Capers involved stealing coal from the pile or a keg of beer or sneaking to the Greyhound Pub on Pristow Green, a ten-minute walk west through farm fields or five-minute bike ride past the bomb store. Sneaking down Moulton Road to the Railway Pub produced many giggles and hair-raising adventures—heck, one beer was enough to turn out the lights for some of the boys.
Gallows humor reigned, and some of the guys were wickedly funny about the mortal dangers that lay over the horizon. They joked that the breakfasts preceding missions were “fattening them up for the kill,” shaved close for the benefit of the fräuleins they might meet, and hoped whoever had packed their parachute wasn’t hungover when he did it. Every time they passed the door of Ops for the 703rd, they saw a sign neatly printed in Olde English lettering. It read, “We don’t bomb Germany. We shower them with our burning wreckage.”
They lived for letters from home but had to be careful about what they said when they wrote back for fear of the censors returning the letter, and they didn’t want their loved ones to worry. All anyone in the States could know was that they were “somewhere in England.” The letters rolled in from all corners of the family every day, including relatives the men couldn’t even remember. Many bored personnel at Station 124 became avid letter writers for the only time in their lives. But it wasn’t easy for the fliers among these rookie correspondents because when Jim or any of the aviators wrote home, how could they talk about what it was really like? Should you mention you’re so high up that if the oxygen gets shut off you asphyxiate in a couple of minutes? Or tell Mom and Dad the ship’s fuselage is so thin that a piece of shrapnel will cut your throat in half a second, and a red-hot tracer from a fighter could split your skull faster than that? Do you mention that on the last mission, poor Sid the other waist gunner had his femoral artery severed by a piece of shell and would have bled to death except the extreme cold had turned his blood to sludge? Or that you were staring at rolled-up bunks on the other side of the hut because the plane the other crew was in took a direct hit over the target and exploded? No, they couldn’t say any of those things. They spoke in generalities and said not to worry.
Luckily the men of Tibenham had a number one topic of conversation to capture the imaginations of the folks back home, something none of the other bases could boast: Jimmy Stewart is stationed here at my base. This news produced return letters from family and friends in a deluge. What’s he like? Can you send me a picture of you and Jimmy? I would love an autograph, if it’s not too much trouble. The men on Sharrard’s crew or Johnson’s or Conley’s could legitimately say, “Major Stewart is way too busy to sign autographs, but when you read in the newspaper that he flew a mission, I was probably flying right there with him in the formation, maybe in the same plane.”
Jim’s star power wasn’t limited to crews and their loved ones back home. Even the command officers wanted to spend all the time they could with him and be seen in candid stills taken by military photographers that might make it back to their local newspapers stateside. This was one thing Jim would just have to grin and bear: exploitation by his superiors. Get a drink or two in him, and Jim might even wander over to the nearest piano and offer up his go-to number, “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” It was a song he had learned to sing and play on the piano long ago, and it came in handy at any and all gatherings of officers now. He had to admit, officers hanging all over him wasn’t such a bad thing anyway since he relied on these men for favors—like keeping the press away.
Yes, the man himself had grown more aloof than ever, more buried in his work of keeping the squadron flying and his men in good spirits, those in the air and the crews on the ground. Heck, the boys on the ground worked as hard as anybody to keep the birds in the air, so he made sure to visit them often and keep conversations going, ask questions about the repairs and about tendencies with the Liberators. There were always missions to prep for; every day that the weather held, the group would go up, often with maximum effort.
Yet even the loner grew lonely. He saw what some men of his squadron had at age twenty or twenty-two, a wife and partner who became a lifeline even four miles in the air, or especially that high up. Bob Kiser blushed and smiled his wide innocent smile at the mention of Judy; Neil Johnson had his sweetheart, June; Chick Torpey wasn’t only crazy about Betty but had named his plane after her. Bill Minor had eyes only for Dolores. Jim would spend quiet evenings in his quarters revisiting the touchstones of home, the letter from Dad and its copy of the 91st Psalm and the lipstick-smeared handkerchief given to him by Roz Russell. He found them so at odds, one speaking of home and hearth and the other of a man at loose ends, with a hundred conquests and no special woman in Indiana or Hollywood who was waiting for him, worrying for his safety, haunting the mailman for a letter.
He was staying abreast of the news from back home via the Indiana Evening Gazette. He read that old Mrs. Gessler, the organist at church, had died after a brief illness; that Pennsylvania was on the verge of an “egg famine” and a coal shortage; that Dad and the fire company had to put out fires at the liquor store on Philadelphia Street on consecutive days that turned out to be the work of an arsonist.
He was forced to read about himself, as with an article titled, STEWART SAID LONELIEST MAN with the subhead, Indiana Captain Too Busy to Talk to News Writers. He knew he was asking a lot, to be a movie star on the one hand and a combat aviator on the other, yet here he was, within a guarded perimeter somewhere in England. Right where he wanted to be.