3

NEWARK AIRPORT
1130 HOURS
AUGUST 13, 1942

 
Three of the four men in the 1941 Ford wooden-bodied station wagon were wearing the uniforms of Pan American World Airways’ aircrews. The two middle-aged Air Transport Command captains had in fact been Pan American Airways pilots before volunteering for the Air Corps. They had taken Pan American uniforms—including one for Stanley S. Fine—out of mothballs for the African flight.

The C-46 now had painted on the fuselage the insignia of CAT, the Chinese Airline, and Chinese registration numbers. Pan American’s experienced pilots were routinely hired by aircraft manufacturers to deliver aircraft to foreign airlines. All departing transatlantic flights, military and civilian, were controlled by the Air Corps. The great majority of these flights left from Newark. The C-46 had consequently been flown from Lakehurst to Newark three days before; the more routine their flight appeared, the better. From all outward appearances, theirs was just one more routine ferry flight.

As the station wagon approached the airfield, with the skyscrapers of New York City visible beyond the ironwork of the Pulaski Skyway, a B-17E passed over them, flaps and wheels lowered, and touched down.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Fine said dryly. “Four engines, too.”

“Oh ye of little faith!” Homer Wilson, the older of the two ex-PAA pilots, chuckled.

Once they had shown their papers to the guard and been passed inside the fence, they drove past long rows of B-17Es sitting on parking ramps. Sometimes as many as a hundred B-17s left Newark every day for England. The details of these ferry flights had been explained during one of their briefings—an operation Fine thought remarkably casual. They simply formed up flights of twenty or twenty-five aircraft. Two of the planes in each flight had pilots and navigators familiar with the route—qualified people who did nothing but fly back and forth across the Atlantic. The rest of the flight just followed the leaders. The trip was in two legs, first to Gander Field, in Newfoundland, and then across the Atlantic to Prestwick Field, Scotland.

They drove to a Quonset hut with a “Transient Flight Crews Report Here” sign nailed above its door.

The hut was jammed with Air Corps fliers, officers and enlisted men, almost all of them carrying Val-Paks and duffel bags. Some of them, Fine thought, were behaving like a high-school football team en route to a game. A few others, the brighter ones—or perhaps those who weren’t so new to this sort of thing—sat quietly and thoughtfully, as if they knew what they were getting into and were considering their chances of living through it.

There were a harassed-looking captain and several sergeants behind a small counter. The officer spotted the civilians.

“You’re the CAT guys?” he asked.

“Right,” Fine said.

The captain flipped through sheets of paper on a clipboard and pulled one loose and handed it to Fine.

“They took it out of the hangar,” he said. “It’s on the parking ramp, way down at the end. You got wheels?”

Fine nodded.

“When you’ve checked it over, come back here,” the captain said, “and we’ll see about getting you off.”

The C-46, surprisingly, looked larger than the B-17E parked next to it. It was in fact a larger airplane, even though it had only two engines to the B-17E’s four.

As they were walking around it, starting the preflight check, a B-17E on its landing approach came over them at fifty feet, the noise of its throttled-back engines deafening.

They found a work stand, manhandled it into place, and removed the inspection plates on the port engine while the B-17E taxied up the ramp, turned, and parked beside them.

“I am losing my mind,” Homer Wilson said. “If the kid in the left seat of that thing is a day older than sixteen, I’m Eddie Rickenbacker.”

Fine looked up but couldn’t see anything.

By the time they finished inspecting the engine and were pushing the platform around the nose to the other engine, the B-17E crew had shut the airplane down, done the paperwork, and climbed out. They were standing by the nose, waiting for a ride down the parking ramp.

“You’re right,” Fine said incredulously, “that’s a boy. They’re both boys!”

“No, I’m not,” one of the B-17E pilots said to him, shaking her head. Her hair, which she had had pinned up, came loose and fell across her shoulders. “We’re WASPs.”

“I’m afraid to ask what that is,” Homer Wilson said.

“Women Auxiliary Service Pilots,” she said. “We ferry these from the factory.” She nodded at the C-46. “I thought they were flying these over from the West Coast.”

“Not this one,” Wilson said.

“If somebody with fifteen hundred hours-plus of multiengine time wanted a job with CAT,” she said, “who could she ask?”

“There’s an office in Rockefeller Center,” Wilson said. “But I don’t think you’d want to go to China.”

“Yeah, I would,” she said. “Three trips a week here from Seattle get a little dull.”

They gave the WASP crew, two pilots and a flight engineer, all women, a ride back up the ramp. Both the Pan American pilots seemed stunned, Fine saw.

They were sent to base operations for a pilots’ briefing. A major, an older pilot, told them, using a map and a pointer, that a flight of twenty-three B-17Es would soon begin taking off. They would form up at cruise altitude, nine thousand feet, over Morristown, New Jersey. Then, in four- and five-plane Vs, they would fly north over Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, toward Newfoundland.

“If you can get off the ground now—within the next thirty minutes or so—” he said, “the flight will catch up with you somewhere over Maine. By the time the tail of the flight has gone past you, you should be pretty close to Gander. In other words, you’ll have some company on the scary part of the first leg.”

“Let’s go wind it up,” Homer Wilson said, and they went directly back to the plane, loaded their luggage aboard, and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. There were several fire extinguishers on wheels scattered along the parking ramp, and Fine drafted the security agent to help him wheel one into place.

Once he had his engines running, Homer Wilson paid no attention to Fine at all. Fine heard the hydraulic hiss as the brakes were released; then the C-46 moved onto the taxiway and headed for the far end of the field.