The Secret Warriors

One of the B-17Es in their flight had lost an engine over New Brunswick, left the formation, and turned around and landed safely at Presque Isle, Maine. A second experienced engine trouble over Cape Breton Island, but because of weather conditions at alternative airports, they decided to make the first scheduled stop at Gander Field, Newfoundland. Homer Wilson, who was convinced the B- 17 pilot was probably going to get lost flying by himself, got on the radio and told the other pilot he was above and behind him.

“Suggest you go on oxygen, climb to one five thousand, and get on my tail,” he said. “I’ll throttle back so you can.”

Slowing down caused them to reach Gander two hours after the other B-17Es. And they were on the ground there only long enough to refuel, even though many of the B-17Es “required attention.” One of the lead pilots told them this was standard practice. The mechanics would in fact find very little wrong with engines or anything else, once they investigated the reported red X’s¹². But faced with flying a thirty-four-hundred-mile leg across the North Atlantic, pilots with only a couple of hundred hours could reasonably be expected to be a little nervous.

“I can’t say I blame them. When I had as much time as most of these kids, I thought New York to Boston was a dangerously long hop.”

They took off and headed east on the course the B-17Es would fly en route to their destination in Scotland. Wilson made the takeoff, but before they had even reached cruising altitude, he got out of his seat and turned it over to Fine. He needed rest, and there was no sense sitting there watching the fuel gauge needles move.

Twelve hours into the flight, after his second two-hour stint at the controls, Fine went aft, sat on the round, backless radio operator’s stool, and began cranking the radio directionfinder antenna, a circle of aluminum tubing mounted on top of the fuselage.

A half hour later, the needles of the direction finder jumped into life. Although he could not yet make out the Morse code through the static, Fine went forward and suggested to Wilson that he change course and try to pick it up on his own separate RDF system. When he did, the needle jumped, but the little X flag on the dial, indicating a signal too weak to be reliable, remained in view.

Fine returned to the radio operator’s station and rotated the RDF antenna again. Before long the needle jumped, and he could hear the Shannon identifier. The plane immediately began to bank in that direction.

Fine stood on the navigator’s stand and watched through the plastic navigator’s hemisphere on the top of the C-46 until the last of the B-17Es, on a course for Prestwick, had faded from sight.

The Irish coastline appeared twenty minutes later, a black blur on the horizon that gradually came into focus. An hour later, they made contact with the Shannon tower on the communication radio. They touched down at Shannon with forty-five minutes’ fuel remaining.

“I have just had a profound thought,” Fine said as he stood behind the pilots’ seats while Wilson taxied the C-46 down a taxiway toward the terminal buildings. “Mrs. Fine’s little boy, Stanley, has just flown the ocean.”

“It may be routine to you,” Fine said. “But it’s extremely exhilarating. If I weren’t a happily married man, I would get drunk and chase immoral women.”

The Irish customs officials who met the plane were not the smiling, genial Irishmen of lore. There were four of them, pinch-faced and scowling, and they examined the C- 46’s papers and their passports suspiciously. Then they conducted a thorough search of the airplane itself, as if they had been tipped it was carrying contraband.

Fortunately, they did not go so far as to strip-search the crew, for if they had, they would have learned that Fine was wearing a money belt that held one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of assorted currency and a dozen Hamilton aviator’s chronometers. Possession of either the money or the wristwatches was not illegal, but it was unusual, and he would have been asked questions.

Two of the customs officers stayed with them when they went through the paperwork at the terminal, and stayed with them when they went to the shabby, unpleasant restaurant for dry rolls, artificial strawberry preserves, and tea, but no coffee. The custom officials even followed them into the men’s room, leaning impatiently against cracked and dirty washbasins until they had come out of the stalls.

They took off again after an hour and fifteen minutes on the ground. First they flew west, but then turned on a southeasterly course that would carry them over the southern tip of Ireland and then over the Atlantic on a straight course toward Lisbon.