Chapter 14
GAMBUT
Throughout the night of December 17–18, 1942, Ben and his 93rd comrades flew eastward across North Africa. After losing fourteen men in eleven days since leaving England, disconcerting questions nagged the crews. What would they be asked to do next? How ferociously would the enemy resist their raids? How many more of them would die in the days ahead? The men were left alone with these thoughts as the Liberators droned toward the dawn.
Far below lay the land and sea on which the epic North Africa campaign had unfolded over the past two years. They passed over the current battlefields of Tunisia, where the failure of the Allied race to Tunis had tipped momentum to the Germans. They crossed Tunisia’s east coast and headed out over the Mediterranean, with Ben and other gunners keeping a watchful eye out for enemy night fighters as they skirted Axis-held Libya.
Not quite six weeks earlier, the British had stunned German field marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt. The vaunted Desert Fox had saved the bulk of his army, but only after abandoning seventy-five thousand Italian troops to a sacrificial rearguard action. Rommel’s survivors had been in an inexorable retreat ever since, ceding territory under ground and air attacks.
The previous week had witnessed more setbacks for Rommel in running battles with British general Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. Rommel had been arguing bitterly with Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring over the proper course of action. It was Rommel’s view that Libya was lost and that he should concentrate his forces in Tunisia, but Libya was the last piece of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s African empire, and Il Duce wasn’t ready to accept its loss. In recent days, Mussolini had ordered Rommel to make a stand at El Agheila, a Libyan coastal town notorious as the site of an earlier concentration camp where Italian colonial forces had brutally incarcerated ten thousand Bedouin tribesmen. Hitler concurred with Mussolini’s latest request, and so Rommel had ordered his men to prepare to meet the British.
What made the futile stand even more bitter for Rommel was Hitler’s diversion of reinforcements and supplies from his battered army to Kesselring’s Tunisian bridgehead. Rommel was determined not to sacrifice his Panzer Army in a futile last stand, and so when the British attacked his lines around El Agheila, he began withdrawing his forces on the night of December 12. Now, as Timberlake’s men marked their seventh hour in the air while flying over the Mediterranean gulf that separated the Libyan provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, Ben and his comrades passed about ninety miles north of Rommel’s dispirited army.
Crossing the gulf’s eastern shore near the Libyan city of Benghazi, only recently reclaimed from Rommel’s forces, the weary 93rd men once again entered Allied-controlled airspace. Finally, in the morning light of December 18, their new home came into view.
Emerging from the fuselage of Red Ass, Ben beheld a stark and treeless landscape. The forlorn airfield had been established by Italian forces in 1939, and it had changed hands four times in the fighting between Axis and Allied forces over the past two years. From this bleak outpost, Ted Timberlake’s 93rd airmen were poised to play a crucial role in the quest for victory in North Africa.
93rd Bomb Group, 1942–1943 operational area, Southern Europe and North Africa
BEN’S NEW BASE, ABOUT THREE MILES FROM the Libyan village of Gambut, was variously known as Gambut Main or LG (Landing Ground) 139. Situated about thirty miles southeast of the Libyan port city of Tobruk, the Italian field had been captured by the British in 1941, and the RAF added several satellite airstrips in the surrounding desert. Axis forces had recaptured Gambut Main on June 17, 1941, following the first battle of Tobruk, and the field had been heavily used by German and Italian air units in Rommel’s drive eastward into Egypt. After the recent Axis defeat at the second battle of El Alamein, Gambut Main had been liberated by the New Zealand 4th Infantry Brigade on November 25, 1942.
In the three weeks since the Germans had fled, the same B-24 men who had preceded the 93rd at Fort Myers had used Gambut Main as the staging ground for raids on Axis-held ports in Libya and Tunisia. The men were members of two US B-24 groups now based in the Middle East: the 98th and the spinoff detachment led by Colonel Harry Halverson and now known as the 1st Provisional Bomb Group. Halverson’s crews would soon be reconstituted as the 376th Bomb Group and put under the command of Major Keith Compton, the 93rd’s operations officer, and the 98th and 376th would also take up residence at Gambut Main and a nearby field.
In their brief stay in Algeria, the 93rd had been attached to Major General James H. Doolittle’s Twelfth Air Force. Now they would be assigned to the Ninth Air Force led by fifty-two-year-old General Lewis Brereton, a pioneering aviator of Hap Arnold’s vintage, and his IX Bomber Command, led by General Patrick Timberlake, Ted Timberlake’s oldest brother.
Patrick Timberlake was among the welcoming party for the 93rd as they touched down at Gambut Main. In the weeks prior, the 98th and the Halverson elements had used Gambut as a staging base for raids on Rommel’s supply lines, and the 98th had built a small tent camp at Gambut for bomber crews flying in and out of the base.1
The 93rd would join an escalating campaign aimed at destroying Axis shipping and port facilities in Tunisia and Sicily. The missions promised to be long: It was 885 miles to Tunis, slightly more to Bizerte, and slightly less to the Tunisian ports of Sousse and Sfax; 830 miles to Naples on the Italian mainland and 650 miles to the vital Italian ports on either side of the Straits of Messina separating the toe of mainland Italy from Sicily. Through the fall of 1942, the 93rd’s new parent outfit, the Ninth Air Force, had flown 1,621 sorties and dropped 2,632 tons of bombs on Rommel’s forces and Kesselring’s Tunisian bridgehead.2
Now the 93rd B-24 crews were poised to add their firepower to the punishing campaign against Axis forces in North Africa.
HAVING PRONOUNCED THE GAMBUT AIRFIELD “perhaps the lonesomest place” following a recent visit, General Brereton had described the B-24 crews who began using the base as living “strange lives in the desert.” Brereton’s words would prove prophetic as Ben and his comrades settled into their harsh environment.
When the 93rd arrived, the base boasted only one permanent structure—a blockhouse, in Brereton’s description. Amid warnings of the strong winds and sandstorms they could expect, the 93rd airmen set to working improving the crude tent settlement established by the 98th crews. The six enlisted men of Jake Epting’s Red Ass crew, Ben among them, moved into one of the white, slant-walled tents that were pitched in two clusters. Larger green pyramidal tents would be erected as needed.
The crews would learn through hard experience how to weatherize their tents against temperature swings, sandstorms, wind, and occasional rains that afflicted daily life on the Sahara Desert’s northern fringe. They learned to tether tents securely, dig ditches for drainage, and arrange piles of sandbags to block the fine grains of windblown sand. They fashioned wind and sand breaks with sheet metal scavenged from the shattered German and Italian aircraft that littered the surrounding landscape. Their living arrangements were “tolerable but rugged,” in the dry observation of 93rd historian Cal Stewart.3
Among the hardy creatures that shared the space with the 93rd crews were flies, scorpions, and hyenas. The 93rd’s flight surgeon, Major Wilmer Paine, drew a cot that “was crawling with bedbugs until I killed them with 100-octane gas from Teggie Ann.”4 But the crueler challenge to daily life was the scarcity of water. Their closest water source—a shallow hole dug by British army engineers—was several miles away. On their arrival, the crews were informed that they would receive one canteen of water per day for all their personal needs—drinking, bathing, shaving, and laundry.5
Exploring their surroundings, the 93rd men discovered that their closest neighbors were “Bedouins and goats.” During his recent visit, General Brereton had watched with bemusement as airmen bartered with the Bedouins for eggs. “It requires an art all its own, especially after the [Bedouins] found out how much the Americans hated [military-issue] dried eggs and how much they’d give for fresh eggs,” Brereton observed. “About the only other amusement on off days was souvenir-hunting for items left behind by the Jerries [Germans] and Eyeties [Italians] when they occupied these same fields.”6
As was the case in England, the weather in North Africa wreaked havoc on operational plans. The 93rd didn’t have weather forecasting capabilities at Gambut, so they relied on coded radio messages from higher authorities. The messages were frequently disrupted by atmospheric conditions or enemy jamming efforts. If the forecasts reached Timberlake and his officers at all, they were at least twelve hours old, limiting their usefulness.7
After two days of housekeeping and exploration, the 93rd resumed operations on December 21. Their target was the harbor at Sousse, Tunisia. The 93rd was expected to fly a mission nearly every day, and so Timberlake committed about half his force—a dozen or so crews—to each mission.
The Epting crew sat out the December 21 attack on Sousse, but the following day Ben and his crewmates crowded into the intelligence tent for a pre-mission briefing. They were told they would strike the Tunis harbor and docks. With Ben once again assigned to one of the waist guns, Jake Epting and copilot Hap Kendall coaxed Red Ass into the air and slipped into their assigned spot in the formation for the 850-mile flight to Tunis. The Liberators reached the target without incident, dropped their bombs, and headed for home. By the time Epting and Kendall landed Red Ass at Gambut Main, the crew had been in the air for nine hours and forty-five minutes. Ben was credited with his third mission.
Bad weather over Tunisia grounded the crews for the next seventy-two hours. Some of the men took advantage of the downtime to do more exploring. Others built crude slit-trench bomb shelters or windbreaks, slept, wrote letters, played baseball, or searched for souvenirs.
The officers weren’t reticent about exercising their privileges, and some roared off into the desert in jeeps to search for souvenirs or Bedouins from whom they might be able to procure eggs. One group of officers drove to the Mediterranean seashore, six miles to the north.
On Christmas Eve, Doc Paine and pilot Ken Cool were lounging in the tent they shared when they heard an airman playing a cornet off in the distance. Paine tracked the man down and asked if he would provide musical accompaniment for a Christmas Eve service in the tent that served as the 93rd’s Officers’ Club. A popular 328th Squadron pilot from Racine, Wisconsin, named John L. Jerstad—affectionately known as Jerk—read the story of the birth of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke. After the service, the homesick officers got drunk on bottles of Canadian Club and VO whisky. Christmas arrived with at least one officer in a drunken stupor and others throwing up before collapsing on their cots.8
On Christmas morning, there were Protestant and Catholic chapel services for enlisted men and officers. The Christmas meal didn’t differ from any other day, except for those men who had received canned turkeys from loved ones back home.9 Exercising the privileges of his rank, Ted Timberlake celebrated an elegant Christmas in Cairo with his older brother Patrick.
On December 26, with the weather to the west still foul, the 93rd prepared to resume operations. Fifteen crews were assigned to bomb Tunis, and they huddled for a 10:00 a.m. briefing. A crowd of brass, including generals Frank Andrews, Lewis Brereton, Patrick Timberlake, and Jacob Devers, flew in from Cairo to witness the 93rd in action. They landed at 11:45 a.m., in time to watch fifteen Liberators take off for Tunis. The bombers formed up in the skies overhead and were about to set off for the target when the mission was canceled because of weather. After pumping themselves up for combat, the men were “pretty disgusted” by the development.10
At 7:00 p.m., six crews were summoned back to the intelligence tent for another briefing. The weather in the Tunis area remained questionable, but higher-ups had decided to attempt a raid by a small group of B-24s flying individually. At 10:00 p.m., a raiding party of six B-24s took off, led by Ken Cool in Teggie Ann. Cool missed Tunis in the overcast skies and came under fire from a solitary enemy antiaircraft gun over Bizerte. Blown off course by high winds, he made landfall near Sfax and his bombardier dropped their bombs on the harbor and dock installations before heading for home. They reached Gambut Main at 11:15 a.m. on the morning of December 27 after a long and adventurous night.11
By the time that Cool landed Teggie Ann at Gambut Main, Ben and the Epting crew were preparing for action. Their mission would mark another milestone for Ben, for Epting had asked him to take over the tail turret. At noon, Red Ass was among twelve B-24s led by the 328th Squadron CO Addison Baker that embarked for Tunis. It was a long raid, and the weather forced the crews yet again to divert to an alternate target, but the Epting crew managed to drop their bombs on the Sousse harbor area. It was around 10:30 p.m. when they touched down at Gambut Main.
BACK AT CAMP, THE UNSANITARY conditions and cold desert nights spent shivering under damp blankets were taking a toll on the men. Doc Paine had admitted about fifteen men to the medical tent, some suffering from diarrhea and others with flu-like symptoms.
The men were constantly reminded of the hazards of their work. Around 11:00 p.m. on the night of December 28, Paine was summoned to the airstrip, where a battle-damaged 98th B-24 had made a belly landing. One of the pilots had been killed by a flak burst over Sousse. The surviving pilot had managed to land the damaged bomber without the use of his landing gear. The raids continued as weather allowed. The 93rd briefed twelve crews on December 29, with Tunis the primary target and Sousse the alternate. The raiders were led by pilot K. K. Compton in Teggie Ann, which took four flak hits over Sousse. One member of Compton’s crew earned a Purple Heart when a flak splinter pierced his hand. The bombers hit three ships in Sousse harbor, igniting an explosion in one of the vessels. It also damaged the docks and railroad yards.12
On December 30, Jake Epting and another pilot flew to Abu Suwir, Egypt, along the Suez Canal, on a supply run. Doc Paine tagged along, ostensibly to pick up medical supplies, but he also got in some shopping and sightseeing. The desert between Gambut Main and the Nile River was littered with what Paine estimated to be sixty to one hundred shattered tanks and countless airplanes.
Paine was mesmerized by the sharp contrast between the desert and the Nile Delta, with its heavily populated adobe towns. “Canals, sailing vessels, cypress trees, orange groves, endless tent camps of British troops,” Paine observed. He found the Suez Canal “most interesting.” In the city of Ismailia, Paine bought a watch for himself, silk stockings, a silver bracelet, and a bottle of chianti. He checked into a hotel and “had [a] wonderful hot bath and delicious supper.”13 The following day, before heading back to Gambut Main in the afternoon, Epting and his wingman treated themselves and their passengers to an aerial tour of the Nile Delta area, making two passes around the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids before turning west for their home base.
On New Year’s Eve, the 93rd dispatched twelve Liberators to bomb Sfax. All landed safely by 10:00 p.m. While waiting for their comrades to return, several pilots packed into the Doc Paine–Ken Cool tent to finish off their last quart of rum. At the stroke of midnight, the camp erupted in celebratory pistol fire and the pop-pop-pop of crude firecrackers fashioned by extracting gunpowder from shells.
Ben and his comrades on the Epting crew had finished the year with a four-day break from combat. In the twenty-four days since earning a spot on the crew, Ben had logged four missions and he had earned the trust of his comrades under fire. He had achieved his goal of proving himself in combat, but the missions were taking their toll on all the men.
Over the past week, Doc Paine had expressed deepening concern with the impact of combat stress on the 93rd airmen. One of the men whose mental state especially worried him was a twenty-one-year-old pilot from San Diego named George E. Piburn. In his journal that week, Paine observed, “Piburn needs a rest.”
Since the move to Gambut, Paine had twice spoken to Colonel Timberlake about his concerns over the “strain the men are under.” Paine had also observed worrisome signs within the crew commanded by Arkansan Lew Brown, whose bombardier, Lieutenant John Sparks, had suffered a fatal flak wound in their first raid in Africa. Brown’s copilot, Robert J. Quinlivan, had been badly shaken by the tragedy, and other members of the crew weren’t doing well. “Lew Brown’s crew needs rest—cracking after Lt. Sparks died of flak in frontal lobe left. Advised Col. Ted,” Paine recorded in his journal on December 28. Later that same day, Timberlake convened a meeting with Paine and other senior officers to discuss “flying fatigue,” as the flight surgeon called it.14
There were no easy answers—Timberlake was under pressure from higher-ups to keep his crews flying as the campaign in North Africa hurtled to a climax. Yet the concern about men breaking under the strain was also a subject of urgent discussion among senior US air commanders and medical personnel in England. How long could men like Ben withstand the unique physical and psychological demands of aerial combat? The American air commanders could only speculate, but the New Year would reveal some worrisome answers.