If the crewmen of Eighth Bomber Command and RAF Bomber Command were a little paranoid in World War II, who could blame them? It would have seemed to them that practically everything was stacked against their survival. Any insurance actuary would have projected a very low probability for their completing their tours of duty. If the flak didn’t get you, the fighters would; and if not the fighters, the cold, anoxia, mechanical failure, outrageous weather, or battle fatigue. Even ordinary everyday fear could nail you.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, and do what things the rules consider wise. And take whatever pity they may dole. Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come and put him into bed? Why don’t they come?
—from Disabled by Wilfred Owen
FLAK, n. German, Flieger Abwehr Kanone; anti-aircraft cannon.
“I could hear him yelling, ‘I’ve been hit. I’ve been hit.’ He was standing in the middle of the floor. He had his hands between his legs . . . he was jumping up and down and yelling, ‘I’ve been hit.’”
—Larry Bird, 493rd Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“Most of the time when you are over enemy territory you have a funny feeling, particularly when you can see flak. You know that it can hurt you, but you look out there and it’s fascinating because it comes up like a little armless dwarf. There’s a round puff here and then there’s usually two strings that come out of the bottom like legs, and this thing will appear out of nothing. You don’t see any shell; you don’t hear anything. You just see this little puff of smoke and then shortly after, it might sound like somebody is throwing gravel all over the airplane. You’re fascinated by it. You know it can hurt you very badly, but you’re fascinated by it . . . you watch it. It’s kind of like watching a snake.”
—W.W. Ford, 92nd Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“It wasn’t always the long trips that were the worst. Sometimes we got more flak near the English coast than we did over the target. That was the Royal Navy. It didn’t matter what we did—shoot off the colors of the day and everything—the Navy always fired at us.”
—Leonard Thompson, No 550 Squadron, RAF
“The flak was unpleasant, although one always felt we were unlikely to get a direct hit. On the run into the target it became more accurate, mainly because we had to fly straight and level for a few minutes for the bombsight to settle down and the bomb aimer to ensure that the cross hairs were on the target when he released the bombs. With a hundred or so aircraft making virtually the same run, the anti-aircraft gunners had an opportunity to get some steady shooting in.”
—John Curtiss, Nos 578 and 158 Squadrons, RAF
Among the most common wounds suffered by the airmen of the Eighth USAAF was flak, pieces of exploding anti-aircraft shells that pierced the thin aluminum skin of their aircraft.
“. . . Kept telling myself, just the way I told the men, that it was going to be a lot better to fly straight instead of zigging. We’d get through the area where they could shoot at us more rapidly, and the enemy would necessarily fire fewer rounds. All in all, we’d have a better chance of getting off with whole hides—people and airplanes alike.”
—from Mission With LeMay by General Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor
Ambulance personnel on an 8AF base in WW2 England;
“Flak was ever-present, a fact of life, a thing to be endured. We encountered flak on all but a half dozen missions. We learned to live with it, but we never became used to it.”
—Robert F. Cooper, 385th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“The noise is the soft flak. You can’t hear it hit the airplane. I remember vividly on a raid . . . it wasn’t Schweinfurt. It wasn’t that rough on our crew, but it was terrible. We lost about half a dozen planes, and one of them was right in front of me in the formation, and it just absolutely exploded, just a big ball of debris and we could feel that debris hit our airplane, and that was a very unpleasant sensation.”
—David Parry, 390th Bomb Group, Eighth USAAF
A wounded gunner is helped from his B-17 bomber to a waiting ambulance on the airfield.
“Flak is flak is flak, right? Wrong! Depending upon your mental state, the same flak that on one given mission might only make your mouth dry and your breathing labored could cause near panic. Take for example, our mission of 23 March 1945 to the marshaling yards at Gladbach, Germany. On that day each nearby burst of flak convinced me that the next one would tear our plane out from under us.
“Each time the Fort bucked and rocked as the pilots juggled the throttles and wheels, trying to maintain combat formation, I expected to hear the propellers of another Fort ripping through our wing or tail surface, sending us scurrying to an escape hatch—a not uncommon occurrence on bomb runs.
“On reaching the Initial Point, our pilot ordered me to begin throwing chaff. On this clear day it was a useless effort, but at least it gave me something to do. I swivelled my seat around, grabbed the foot-long triangular cardboard package of aluminum foil strips and heaved it out of the chaff chute. With my two-piece flak vest tied snugly above each hip and my steel helmet pulled down over my goggles I waited the recommended twenty-second interval and heaved out another batch of chaff. At 25,000 feet with unlimited visibility our squadron began its unwavering run into the target while the enemy flak batteries began tracking our progress. With the ever-closer flak bursts causing our plane to bob and bounce I thought, ‘To hell with the twenty-second interval’ and started chucking out chaff at the chute as quickly as I could.
“Suddenly, a near burst sent pieces of shrapnel tearing through our airplane’s thin skin. I was seeing bright blue and was terrified. The countdown began and, at ‘bombs away,’ the Fort lurched abruptly upward as it shed its three-ton bomb load. The pilot poured on the power and banked us quickly out of harm’s way, and I started to breathe again.”
—David C. Lustig, 384th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“We put a pressure bandage on Ralph’s leg wound, but the temperature at our altitude really did more to stop the bleeding and the blood started to freeze around the wound. I took the morphine out of the first aid kit. The syrette looked like a small tube of toothpaste with a needle on the end. I warmed it up under my heated suit and aimed the needle at the muscle a few inches from the anterior hole in his thigh. At first I pushed kind of easy, but the darned thing didn’t go in, so I shoved hard and it slid into his thigh. Then I squeezed the contents into him and in a few minutes Ralph drifted off to sleep.”
—Roger Armstrong, 91st Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
ARMOR, n. A defensive covering, such as chain mail, worn to protect the body against weapons.
Like the medieval knights, the airmen who flew in bombers during World War II were well motivated to protect themselves in any way they could from occupational hazards. They feared flak more than enemy fighters, and many had rather crude items of personal armor made for them by obliging, sympathetic ground personnel.
Late in 1942, at the behest of the Chief Surgeon of the Eighth Air Force, Brigadier General Malcolm Grow, the Wilkinson Sword Company designed and produced a bullet-proof vest composed of overlapping magnesium steel plates. The plate network was covered in heavy canvas and was called a “flak vest” or “flak suit.” It was designed to be worn over the parachute harness. It could be removed in a hurry by the use of a pull cord, and it weighed twenty pounds. Production of this personal body armor began in October 1942 and was first worn on an Eighth Bomber Command mission by crews of the 91st Bomb Group (H) on 12 December. Eventually it was determined that, of the personnel wounded by flak shrapnel fragments while wearing the flak vest, two-thirds escaped significant injury.
ANOXIA, n. A pathological deficiency of oxygen.
Many bomber crewmen experienced severe problems from an insufficient supply of oxygen during their missions in World War II. A number of fatalities resulted from faulty or inadequate oxygen equipment in the early days of the British and U.S. bombing offensives in the European Theatre of Operations.
“I knew nothing about the guns, but anything else was supposed to be my department. Oxygen, everything. One night we were over Mont Blanc, on our way to Munich through the back door. We’d gone over Italy and were coming back over the Alps when Jeff, our pilot, started going a bit weird. Woozy . . . drunk almost. It was lack of oxygen. That’s one of the signs. So, I whipped off his pipe. We had portable oxygen bottles strewn about and I put one on him and turned it on full. It took quite some time before it had any effect. He was still woozy and we were going to yank him out of his seat. I could fly the thing. I’d had some instruction and I’d flown it on air tests, as the flight engineer was supposed to fly it in case of an emergency. All I could have done was fly it straight and level so everybody could bale out. Then Jeff came round and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘You suffered from lack of oxygen, Jeff. Are you all right now?’ I shook his disconnected oxygen tube and ice had collected in it.”
—Jack Clift, No 463 Squadron, RAF
Fire, n. A rapid, persistent chemical change that releases heat and light and is accompanied by flame, especially the exothermic oxidation of a combustible substance.
Probably the airman’s greatest fear is fire. More than any of his other worries—oxygen starvation, extreme cold, fatigue, frostbite, enemy fighters, and flak—it was the horror of a fire in the aircraft that disturbed the sleep of bomber crewmen and went with them every time they flew.
Flak so thick you could get out and walk on it, was how the aircrews of the Eighth tended to describe this fearsome hazard;
A wounded gunner is lifted from the waist window of his bomber on its return to England after a raid.
“On 25 January 1945, we flew on a fighter affiliation training sortie with a Spitfire. After completing the training we started our recovery to base when the port inner engine caught fire. We were unable to put the fire out or to feather the prop. The oil pipeline to the feathering motor had cracked, spraying oil onto the hot engine.
“The fire quickly spread to the whole wing and the aircraft became very difficult to control. Our pilot ordered us to abandon the aircraft. In the Halifax the navigator’s seat was over the forward escape hatch so that I was quickly able to fold the seat, put on my parachute, jettison the hatch and jump out.
“We were very low, about 1,500 feet, but the canopy deployed quickly and almost before I had time to look around and see the aircraft plunge into the ground I had landed in a ploughed field.
“A farmer arrived on the scene promptly and took me to his nearby farmhouse where I was able to phone the base, which was only a few miles away. When I arrived back at base I found to my great distress that only the wireless operator had survived and that my pilot and four of the crew had been killed. The bomb aimer was a stand-in as ours had laryngitis. He should have been second out, but he was a young Canadian sergeant who froze. The wireless operator sensibly decided to go next.”
—John Curtiss, Nos 578 and 158 Squadrons, RAF
“I was flying a B-52 night training mission out of Bergstrom Air Force Base, Austin, Texas. After the usual lengthy pre-flight, the crew boarded the airplane. We stowed our equipment and strapped ourselves in our ejection seats. We ran the checklists and, with all eight engines running, completed the taxi checklist and received clearance into the number one position for take-off. I aligned the bomber with the runway heading and set the brakes. I set the power, released the brakes and we started to roll.
“The co-pilot adjusted the engine pressure ratios evenly, and all engine instruments checked OK. A hundred things were going through my mind . . . acceleration, engine output, exhaust gas temperatures, what to do in case of an emergency, and many more. I was watching the runway marker boards as they flashed by—12,000 feet of runway with a 2,000-foot overrun marker at 180 knots of airspeed as the airplane got light and began to fly. I climbed to 1,000 feet and started my flaps-up profile, trying not to lose too much altitude. I climbed out to 37,000 feet on an easterly heading and then started a long navigation leg toward Albany, New York. We completed the take-off and climb checklist and settled down for the long, twelve-hour flight.
“At about the four-hour mark I had to go downstairs to relieve myself. There was a fireplug urinal that you could stand at, and while doing this I decided to flip on the bomb bay lights and look in there. I was shocked to see a three-inch stream of jet fuel running on top of the alternator bay to the deck underneath, which had a four-inch lip. The fuel was pouring over the edge onto the tires in the wheel well and down onto the bomb bay. As I snapped up, I studied the situation. I went over to where the navigator was sitting and told him what was happening. His eyes got as big as saucers and he said something about baling out. I said, ‘No, but plot me a course that will take me back to Bergstrom, avoiding any populated areas.’ I went back up the ladder to my seat and told Tom, my co-pilot, about the situation in the bomb bay and asked him about the fuel state. He said that about 10,000 gallons or 60,000 pounds were missing. I didn’t know then that the Marmon clamp, which held the three-inch fuel lines together at the top of the fuselage, had come apart and no amount of valve closing or cross-feeding would stop the flow of fuel.
“The alternator deck was located just below the four alternators which supplied electrical AC power to the aircraft, and was now full of JP5 fuel. The alternators were evidently vapor-proof as they did not create sparks that might have ignited the fuel fumes.
“Tom brought up the question of our ejecting, and I said, ‘No, not yet.’ I banked the airplane five degrees and headed back to Texas. I then called the SAC Command Post and told them about our problem. I said that I was not transferring fuel across the airplane and that I had more than 10,000 gallons of JP5 running out into the alternator bay. They asked about my intentions and I said I would continue the flight back to Bergstrom. They asked if we intended to eject, and they left that to my discretion.
“We arrived back in the Bergstrom area where it was still dark. We had returned there at 44,000 feet to conserve fuel, and we were still losing fuel at the same rate and had now lost some 20,000 gallons, We had a major leak.
“As the sky became lighter, I called our base. They knew what was going on as they had been monitoring the SAC Command frequency. I set us up in a holding pattern in the Bergstrom area and asked the radar operator to go take a look in the bomb bay. He said I would have to give him a direct order to do so, and I decided to go myself. I went back downstairs and saw to my dismay that the fuel was still pouring out of the three-inch pipe at the same rate. I then returned to my seat, strapped in with oxygen mask on and the bale-out bottle knob in a handy position, and advised everyone to get ready for a quick ejection. Some of the crew said that they wanted to eject, but I told them that there was nothing electrical that wasn’t vapor-protected, and that it was safe. They reluctantly agreed. I then ordered the radar operator to open the bomb bay doors. At Bergstrom they had a telephoto camera aimed at us and we were in good range as we had now descended to 6,000 feet, the minimum bale-out altitude. The bomb doors opened and all 20,000 gallons of fuel seemed to evaporate in an instant, but some of it covered the airplane. The engine exhaust then ignited it and there was a big flash, but we flew out of the flash in one piece.
“All of the fuel that had accumulated in the bomb bay was now gone, but there was a fuel stream coming out through the bomb bay doors, which could certainly be lethal. We were now very low on fuel, having flown some seven hours, and we needed to land soon. I had Tom lower the flaps and they worked fine, as the flap motors were sealed. Next came the landing gear. We had steel-impregnated tires, which meant that we could land on ice, snow, or a wet runway and have a good co-efficient of friction for stopping the plane. But all of the four forward tires were saturated with jet fuel and I expected them to lay a trough of fire when we touched down. I lowered the gear and again nothing happened, except for more streaming fuel. I flew the downwind leg to the north, turned base and final and approached the end of the runway at 145 knots indicated. We touched down at the 1,000-foot marker. It was a smooth landing, but as soon as we touched, a streak of flame erupted from the tires and they began to burn the fuel that had soaked into them.
Administering a transfusion under the wing of an 8AF bomber;
“I braked hard and had Tom pull the drag chute; we stopped in 7,000 feet. I immediately cut the eight engines and rang the bell to evacuate the airplane. I was out of my harness and behind Tom as we jumped down the ladder and out of the bottom of the plane, where the fire was burning real well. We ran ahead of the airplane and off the left wing to our crew assembly point in case of a crash-landing.
“The crash crew arrived with their foam and hoses. They had to go into the bomb bay to squirt foam up into the alternator deck. It took them thirty minutes to get the fire under control and put out all of the smouldering tires. A crew bus picked us up and took us to the maintenance debriefing room. All the ‘wheels’ were there wanting to know what had happened. After cleaning up the foam, the maintenance inspectors looked at the Marmon clamps and saw what had happened. They wired SAC headquarters and Boeing in Seattle. All B-52s were promptly grounded until they had been inspected. A permanent fix was made and all of the clamps were changed. For us it had been a rather hair-raising experience.”
—Joseph Anastasia, B-52 pilot, U.S. Air Force
FATIGUE, n. Physical or mental weariness resulting from exertion.
“We would make runs in formation, on fictitious targets in England, get back to base, and make some instrument approaches and landings for hours—just touch the wheels down, give it the gun, go around, and come back for another. All the time there was something to do—work on your radio operator’s speed, your engineer’s know-how, there was always training to do. We carried a very high fatigue factor at that time. If I had five minutes in a chow line I could go to sleep standing up.”
—Lawrence Drew, B-17 pilot, 384th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“I remember that period of forty hours in which I flew three ops. On 14 October 1944, Harmer, our pilot, was grounded with a cold. Flying Officer Lewis needed a bomb aimer, so I went along with him to Duisburg in daylight. I had just gone to bed when I was dragged out to go to Duisburg again with Lewis. Take-off at 00.39 on 15 October. It was a bad trip. We could see the target burning 100 miles away, from our morning attack. There were nightfighters around and we were nearly coned by searchlights over the target. I began to appreciate the talents of my own crew. So, I got back home, ate my bacon and eggs with sleepy eyes, and suddenly found that I was scheduled for another trip, with Harmer and my own crew, at 1800. I napped for a couple of hours in the mess, checked my bomb load, perspex, guns, circuits—check, check, check—dozed through the ops briefing, and took off for Wilhelmshaven. On the way home I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I was with my own crew so it didn’t really matter. At the interrogation, the squadron commander suddenly realized that I had been out on the last three. He was impressed. I was not—all I wanted was a bed. One more, to Essen, and my tour was over. Thirty-nine trips.”
—Ken Roberts, No 158 Squadron, RAF
“The people playing poker in our Nissen hut had the lights on, and they would play all night. An officer said, ‘C’mon fellas, have a heart—some guys have got to fly tomorrow.’ They just said something back to him and went right on playing. So, he took a .45 from the head of his bed, walked down the line and shot all those lights out. We had it dark in there after that, for the rest of the night anyway.
—Lawrence Drew, B-17 pilot, 384th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
Examining flak damage in the skin of an RAF heavy bomber.
The result of a collision at Thorpe Abbotts, the base of the 100th Bomb Group, on 27 December 1943. The gropup suffered appalling operational losses and became known in the Eighth Air Force as the “Bloody 100th.”
WEATHER, n. The state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind velocity, and barometric pressure. Adverse or destructive conditions such as high winds or heavy rain.
December 1940. The crews of RAF Bomber Command were operating in the worst European weather in living memory. The Hampdens, Wellingtons, and Whitleys they flew in were being subjected to ice that formed on their wings, in their turrets and hydraulic systems, instruments and radio equipment, causing catastrophic malfunctions. Perspex windscreens were opaqued, bringing cockpit visibility down to zero. Airmen whose jobs required them to remove their leather gauntlets and lining gloves to attend to some essential task, risked severe frostbite. If they were unfortunate enough to touch bare skin to any metal surface in the aircraft while at the sub-zero temperatures of high altitude, their flesh would freeze instantly to that metal.
Flying missions at high altitude in the big, heavy Liberators, Lancasters, Fortresses, and Halifaxes meant prolonged exposure to extreme cold and the hazards it could bring. Frostbite was a very real concern for the men who flew in the bombers of World War II. For the unfortunate airmen who experienced this injury, exposure to the bitter -20 to -50° F cold at operational altitudes could and did bring about the destruction of the skin and underlying tissues of the nose, ears, fingers, and toes. To combat this natural enemy, specially-designed flying clothing had to be worn. Often, it failed to provide the necessary levels of protection, and led to additional problems for already overburdened aircrew. The General Electric F-1 “blue bunny suit” first utilized by the B-17 and B-24 gunners of the Eighth Air Force in the winter of 1942-43 had an inherent flaw. Its wiring tended to short out and the suit then failed. It happened so often that the majority of those using the suit elected to wear additional heavy fleece-lined leather flying clothing over the electric suit. In addition, gunners wore electrically-heated gloves and boots.
They were also provided with electric muffs for use on hands and feet should the gloves or boots fail. Instead of trusting the reliability of the various electrically-heated garments, many airmen chose to wear a suit of thick pile sheepskin that included a B-6 jacket and A-5 trousers. This outfit was worn over heavy woolen underwear, usually long johns, two pairs of wool socks, sometime a pair of felt, electrically-heated moccasins, a shearling-lined helmet and standard A-6 boots. Pilots had the problem of keeping their hands warm while being unable to properly feel the cockpit controls through the heavy or heated flying gloves issued at the time. Many wore a thin silk glove under a relatively thin USAAF-issue A-10 goatskin winter flying glove, providing reasonable warmth and allowing enough sensitivity. With cockpit heating, pilots and co-pilots were often comfortable wearing their A-2 leather flying jackets.
The sad end of a Liberator.
As the war progressed, so too did the efficiency of garments developed for the Allied bomber air crews, and the overly bulky, cumbersome and awkward togs of the war’s middle years gave way to ones of greater comfort and reliability.
“It was fairly cold in the Nissen hut and we never did have enough coal to heat it well. People were forever tossing CO2 cartridges into our stove. You’d be backed up to it on a cold day, when all of a sudden it would just blow up and hot coals would fly all over the place and scare everybody.”
—Lawrence Drew, pilot, 384th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
“No bomber went off without a rear gunner. I went up in a Wellington, just an air test with a squadron leader up in Scotland near Lossiemouth, and I think he forgot about me. He said we were not going far. He just wanted to air-test it and he went up about 10,000 feet. I hadn’t got any gear on at all. Mae West and parachute. No flying gloves. Nothing. Ended up nearly frostbitten on my fingers and hands. To this day they get white when it’s cold. Hands are always cold in there. It was dreadfully cold in the tail of the Halifax. You had no heating. You had an electric suit. Sometimes they worked all right. Sometimes. But if you got a duff one, you wouldn’t know it until you plugged in. I had four guns, .303 Brownings, and we had a removable slide in the turret, so we were completely open there, along with two panels at the side which we removed as well. At night, when you are looking out, the least little speck on that turret, after four hours of looking, that speck is a German fighter. You keep coming back to it and you convince yourself it’s a fighter. So you remove the panels to see better. Of course, you have your goggles up on your forehead. We never had them on over our eyes. You could see better without them. But, oh, the cold. I had both my eyes operated on while I was in the Air Force, for cysts from the cold.”
—Fred Allen, No 158 Squadron, RAF
“The weather reports were real inaccurate, so if they said you should break out of the clouds at 1,500 feet, it might actually be 18,000 feet—and I recall one time when it was.”
—Ray Wild, pilot, 92nd Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF
FEAR, n. A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger.
“There is an old saying which goes something like this: ‘Cowards die many deaths, but a brave man dies but one.’ If this saying be true, then I am not only a coward myself, I am fighting the war with a lot of other cowards. A story in the Eighth Air Force tells about a group commander who read an advertisement in a magazine which asked the question, ‘Who’s afraid of the new Focke-Wulf?’ This group commander cut out the ad, signed his name to it and pinned it on the group bulletin board. After all of the pilots in the group had confessed their fear by signing, the page was mailed back to the U.S. advertiser.
“We are all afraid and only liars or fools fail to admit it. There are a variety of possible deaths which face a member of a bomber crew and each man is free to choose his own pet fear. A tire could blow out or an engine could fail on take-off. The oxygen system or electric heating system might fail at high altitude. There is the fear of explosion or mid-air collision while flying formation. In addition to these there is the ever-present possibility of being shot down by enemy fighters or anti-aircraft fire.
“In dealing with the enemy, there is a certain feeling of helplessness about the bomber business which I find to be very distasteful. Imagine, for a moment, that you are required to carry two five-gallon cans of gasoline down a dark alley. These cans weigh over thirty pounds each so your hands are full and you can’t run very fast. As you pass a certain corner in this alley, you know that a number of thugs are waiting to club you as you pass. However, there is a policeman patrolling this beat (your fighter escort) and if he happens to be at the dangerous corners at the time you arrive, then everything will be OK, unless, of course, there are more thugs than the policeman can handle. Some of the thugs don’t attack with clubs, but stand back (out of sight) and throw firecrackers at your cans of gasoline.
“The bomber pilot can’t fight back, but must just sit there and take it. I believe this explains why there is such a difference between the bomber and fighter boys. The man in this latter group can match his skill against the enemy. He carries a club of his own with which to fight back. I do not find the light-hearted, devil-may-care spirit on the bomber station which has been so often described in stories about pilots in the last war. Our men go about their grim business with sober determination. When we are alerted for a mission, the bar closes early and everyone goes to bed. To be sure, at our monthly parties, if there is no mission the next day, the boys get pretty drunk. I do not discourage this as I feel it gives them a much-needed chance to blow off some steam.
“When a new crew arrives on the station I try to have a talk with the men during the first twenty-four hours after arrival. One of the points stressed is that we are all afraid. I tell them that the worst part of a mission is just before the take-off. If they can ‘sweat it out’ through this period, they will get through the rest all right. The flight surgeons are particularly helpful in spotting men who are showing signs of anxiety. If a crew goes through a particularly rough mission and is badly shot up, we try to send them to the ‘flak house’ (rest home) for a week. In fact, all crews are sent to the flak house for a rest at some time during their combat tour. Although I never find time to get to one of these rest homes myself, I am told that they are well run and very successful.
“Winston Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran, wrote a book about courage in combat. I like his definition of courage: ‘a moral quality . . . not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will . . . Some men were able to see more clearly that there was no decent alternative to sticking it out and to see this not in a hot moment of impulse but steadily through many months of trial. They understood on what terms life was worthwhile.’”
—from the World War II letters of Major General John M. Bennett, Jr, a commander of the 100th Bomb Group (H), Eighth USAAF, to his father.
HAZARD, n. A chance of being injured or harmed; danger.
“I arrived at No 19 Operational Training Unit, RAF Kinloss in Scotland around 10 November 1940 and was greeted with the news that nineteen aircrew had been killed during training in the previous week, which was rather daunting. The morning after our arrival, I was asked to escort a coffin to the railway station. There was only one casualty on our course—a trainee who went under the wing of a Whitley bomber to pick up a practice bomb that had fallen off. He was struck by a propeller and suffered brain damage. Generally, training was more or less incident-free.”
—Alfred S. Tarry, No 51 Squadron, RAF
Severe flak damage to the cockpit of this B-24 Liberator.
