Chapter 16
ON TO ITALY
While Ben and his B-24 comrades waited for the storms to subside, events in Tunisia had taken another unhappy turn for the Allies. An early December debacle had decimated American armored units, and now the Allies were making a final attempt to sever Rommel’s lifeline to Italy by seizing Tunis.
As a prelude to the push through the Medjerda River valley, Anglo-American forces sought to secure a strategic patch of high ground that had fallen into German hands. The Coldstream Guards drew the assignment to seize what the cricket-loving British had christened Longstop Hill. The eight-hundred-foot hill was two miles long and sprawled to within a few hundred yards of the Medjerda River, posing a threat to any Allied advance through the valley.
The Coldstream Guards seized the hill as planned on the night of December 22, and at 4:30 a.m. on December 23, began abandoning their positions for soldiers of the US Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment, part of Major General Terry Allen’s Big Red One Division. In the dark and rain, eight hundred US infantrymen ended up scattered around the hill. But the Coldstream Guards had abandoned several forward positions before the Americans were in place, allowing the Germans to promptly reclaim the ground. Even worse, the British had somehow failed to notice that Longstop Hill actually was two hills, one of which was nominally in American hands and the other of which was still in German hands.1
The Germans quickly took advantage of the Allied mistakes. Under fierce attack by German Panzergrenadiers, the Americans called for help and the weary Coldstream Guards slogged back to Longstop to stave off an Allied disaster. The Coldstream Guards counterattacked on the afternoon of December 24, and by nightfall the British soldiers with some help from American forces had reclaimed the positions they had vacated the previous day and even gained a tenuous toehold on the second hill. In a Christmas Eve message to the British high command, General Vyvyan Evelegh confidently predicted imminent victory.2
Once again, enemy forces struck first. At 7:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, the Germans launched a fierce counterattack that shattered Allied positions around Longstop. With his forces in danger of being cut off, General Evelegh ordered a retreat. The American and British survivors withdrew in a pouring rain, leaving the Germans to celebrate their victory atop the newly rechristened Christmas Hill.3
With Allied designs on Tunis now in tatters, recriminations rattled through American and British senior ranks. The Americans were “our Italians,” sniffed some British officers. A British after-action report denigrated Terry Allen’s troops as “unfitted and unprepared for the task they were asked to perform, which would, in fact, have been difficult for any battalion.” 4 Incensed by the sniping from comrades-in-arms, Allen confronted his British counterpart with an American report that accused the British of having “completely misused” his 18th Infantry soldiers.5
With the early promise of the Operation TORCH offensive now a distant memory, General Eisenhower braced for a hard fight ahead. In a December 26 cable to the combined Anglo-American chiefs of staff, Eisenhower confessed that the abandonment of the drive on Tunis “has been the severest disappointment I have suffered to date.”6
His original orders had envisioned TORCH forces driving eastward across North Africa to trap Rommel’s army in an Allied vise in the Libyan desert. Now such a spectacular victory seemed unlikely, and in its place loomed the prospect of a bloody slugfest pitting two Allied armies against two Axis armies within the rugged confines of Tunisia.
Under unprecedented pressure, his patience wearing thin, Eisenhower had recently snapped at his handpicked air chief when Major General James H. Doolittle tried to explain why the Luftwaffe still dominated the skies over Tunisia. “Those are your troubles,” Eisenhower barked. “Go and cure them.”7 In the monumental campaign that now confronted Eisenhower, Axis fortunes hinged on continued control of the air and the preservation of vulnerable supply lines. The American B-24 Liberators grounded by weather in the Libyan desert had emerged as a potentially decisive chip in the high-stakes poker game underway in North Africa.
 
THE INHOSPITABLE WINDS THAT SCOURED the eastern Sahara resumed on January 4, and Ben and his 93rd comrades spent another long day huddled in their tents as dust and sand penetrated every crevice, covering their cots and mess kits and everything else inside the tents. The enlisted men had limited options for coping with the tedium of being cooped in their tents. They could sleep, write letters, play cards, or reminisce about their homes and families or dream about their hopes for the future. The 93rd officers, on the other hand, tapped liquor stashes to help pass the hours.
As the winds screeched, Timberlake joined 328th Squadron leader Addison Baker in a drinking session in the tent shared by Doc Paine and Ken Cool. Between the four of them, they polished off a quart of Canadian Club whisky while awaiting the supper hour. An inebriated Paine regaled the others with stories about Meadow Creek Farm, his Blue Ridge homestead outside Charlottesville, Virginia, where he raised sheep and lived the life of a gentleman farmer.
The weather wasn’t the only concern for the generals leading the air campaign in North Africa. The secret discussions about combat fatigue that had become a sudden preoccupation of senior Eighth Air Force officers as the 93rd departed England in early December now vexed the brass of the 93rd’s new parent outfit.
Riding out the storm at his Cairo headquarters, the Ninth Air Force commander, General Lewis Brereton, fretted about this insidious new threat to the combat efficiency of his bomber crews. “Operational fatigue is evident among our combat crews,” Brereton acknowledged in his diary on January 4. But the awareness of combat stress disorders was still embryonic, and Brereton held the prevailing view of his peers that the condition wasn’t so much a medical one as it was a lapse in leadership. He said as much in conversations with Ted Timberlake and the commanders of the 98th and 376th bomb groups. In Brereton’s recollection, “I emphasized to the Group Commands that there was no such thing as a poor organization—that (to paraphrase Napoleon) ‘there are only poor leaders.’”8
In other words, the fatigued airmen were expected to fight through their dark thoughts.
 
THE WEATHER FINALLY BROKE ON JANUARY 5, and the 93rd crews were briefed and climbed into their aircraft for takeoff. For the Epting crew, it would be their first combat mission in nine days. Their target was the port area of Tunis, but weather forced a diversion to their alternate target, the port of Sousse, seventy-five miles south of Tunis, on Tunisia’s east coast. Ben spent ten-and-a-half hours in the air, much of that seated in the cold and cramped tail turret of Red Ass, keeping an eye out for prowling enemy fighters. The mission was otherwise uneventful, and when Ben emerged from the belly of Red Ass, he had earned his first combat award: the Air Medal, bestowed on an airman for every five combat missions completed.
As if the commanders of the bomb groups didn’t have enough worries with the weather and the combat fatigue among their men, the condition of their aircraft now loomed as an issue. The sandstorms had begun to take a toll on the Liberators, and this became apparent during missions. The 328th Squadron commander, a 1941 West Point graduate named Joe Tate, didn’t even attempt a takeoff on the January 5 mission because of aircraft performance issues. The pilot of Hot Freight had turned back because his number three engine kept cutting out.
The sun had emerged in the aftermath of the latest storms, but the weather had turned cold. January 6 was an off day for the airmen, and it happened to be one of the nicest days since their arrival at Gambut. The sun shone and temperatures warmed to the point that Doc Paine and others stripped down to cut-off khaki shorts to soak up some rays. Several of the men organized a raucous softball game. When Ben muffed an attempt to catch a fly ball, one of his crewmates expressed mock outrage and called on the Japanese American gunner to “commit hara kiri” to atone for his miscue. The officers watching the game laughed and Ben played along.9
The 93rd was back in action the following day, January 7, and their target marked a new milestone: They were to attack Italy for the first time, striking Palermo, the largest city on the island of Sicily and the port of origin for many of the ships now funneling supplies to the two Axis armies in North Africa. Palermo was a 750-mile flight from Gambut for the 93rd bombers.
Jake Epting and his men were among the 93rd crews selected to fly the raid. They were briefed at 9:00 a.m. and took off at noon. The mission called for twelve 93rd aircraft to rendezvous with another twelve B-24s from the 98th and the 376th. The plan quickly unraveled when two 93rd aircraft aborted en route to the target because of mechanical problems and the dozen 98th and 376th bombers returned to Gambut Main because of bad weather. The 93rd’s remaining ten aircraft, Epting’s Red Ass among them, pressed on in the gathering twilight.
Arriving over Palermo harbor, Red Ass bombardier Al Naum dropped his bombs without incident and navigator Edward Weir set a course for Gambut Main. Ten hours after departure, Epting and copilot Hap Kendall landed at Gambut Main. It was a triumph for Ben and his crewmates and the other 93rd men who carried out the mission; they had taken the war to the Italian enemy’s homeland for the first time, and they had done so without a single casualty.
No mission was scheduled for January 8, which allowed the men to spend a leisurely day lolling around the camp. Shortly after nightfall, air-raid sirens wailed and the men scanned the skies for signs of enemy marauders. Flares suddenly lit the night sky to the north and antiaircraft guns boomed. The target was an Allied convoy steaming just offshore the Libyan coast, and the antiaircraft guns were aboard the ships. The attack ended, the flares faded, and silence settled over the 93rd’s desert camp.
January 9 marked another day of soothing sunshine. The wind kicked up a bit, but nothing like the previous week. In addition to his duties as flight surgeon, Doc Paine had become the 93rd’s expert on the roving bands of Bedouins, and he had made a game of sorts out of negotiating bigger and better transactions with the locals. He headed off into the desert in a jeep with tins of tea and eight pounds of sugar he had finagled from 93rd mess sergeants for several boxes of cigarettes. In his biggest deal to date, Paine returned to camp with two dozen eggs for him and his tentmate and invited guests. While the enlisted men dined on C-rations, Paine and Ken Cool whipped up a lunchtime spread of scrambled eggs, hash, fried sweet potatoes, and canned peaches, washed down with canned tomato juice and coffee.
After two weeks of close-quarters living in the desert camp, sanitary conditions had deteriorated. There were no latrines or privies, so the men performed their excretory functions by digging a hole and covering it with sand when they finished. This became a problem when the relentless winds began to uncover some of the holes. An army medical inspector visited the 93rd camp on the afternoon of January 9 and was appalled by the filthy conditions, including “crapping paper being blown all over [the] camp,” Doc Paine recorded in his diary. Plans were made to construct latrines before an outbreak of dysentery or other illnesses.
A mission to Bizerte was briefed during the daylight hours of January 9, but it was canceled before takeoff because of weather in the target area.
In the month since their arrival in North Africa, Ted Timberlake’s crews had flown nine missions. They had lost eighteen men in their first week, including fourteen in the crash involving Ox Johnson and his crew. Since the December 13 raid on Bizerte, the 93rd had gone twenty-seven days without any deaths or serious injuries. Most of the raids were carried out in darkness, exploiting the dearth of enemy night fighters in North Africa and Italy. The raids were far longer than what the 93rd crews had experienced flying out of Alconbury, but enemy resistance seemed markedly weaker.
Ben’s initial shock after his first raid on December 13, marked by the traumas of experiencing an antiaircraft barrage and witnessing the wounding of a comrade for the first time, had caused him to doubt whether he would live to see ten missions. Now, with six missions to his credit and four weeks without a casualty, Ben’s odds of survival had seemingly improved. But a tragic ten-day stretch ahead shattered that thinking and impressed upon Ben and his comrades the grim reality of their situation: Death would be a constant and capricious companion any time they took off for a mission.