Chapter 20
RETURN TO ENGLAND
Hap Arnold’s visit briefly boosted morale in the 93rd camp, but feelings of hopelessness bred by the existing policy of open-ended combat tours had pushed a growing number of men to the breaking point. The concerns raised by Doc Paine and others about debilitating combat stress had come to fruition by early February. Over the span of several days, Paine sent five men to Cairo for treatment of combat stress and none resumed their 93rd duties.1 Perhaps most disturbing of all, some men were beginning to demonstrate erratic or even dangerous behavior during missions. One gunner had to be restrained by his crewmates during a raid.
On his return to Gambut Main from some rest and relaxation in Egypt in late January, Paine had a disconcerting conversation with pilot George Piburn. A handsome Southern Californian with an angular face and a solid five-foot-ten frame, Piburn had first exhibited worrisome symptoms in late December, and his mental state had deteriorated since. After speaking to the pilot on January 26, on the eve of Piburn’s twenty-second birthday, Paine concluded Piburn “has ‘thrown in the towel.’” Days later, with fourteen missions to his credit, Piburn made it official and took himself off combat duty. He would leave the 93rd and be assigned to a training command back in the United Kingdom.
Piburn was hardly alone in his struggles. Paine suspected that another pilot who had recently checked into a military hospital complaining of shoulder pain was also suffering from combat stress. “Think he is cracking,” Paine confided to his diary.2
Another source of concern for Paine was First Lieutenant Robert A. Quinlivan, a twenty-one-year-old pilot from Jersey City, New Jersey. Quinlivan had already survived two traumatic combat experiences as the copilot of Flying Cock. On the group’s first raid in North Africa, the December 13 strike on Bizerte, a piece of flak smashed into Flying Cock’s nose compartment and inflicted a fatal head wound on the crew’s bombardier as he sat at his station below Quinlivan’s feet. More recently, during the January 15 raid on Tripoli, Quinlivan narrowly escaped death when an enemy flak burst spattered his helmet with steel splinters. Quinlivan confided to Doc Paine that he “couldn’t stand the idea of flying into flak again.”3 Although he had proven his courage by completing at least ten missions, earning an Air Medal with an Oak Leaf Cluster, Quinlivan was finished as a combat pilot.
How many more good men would break in the days ahead? As February 1943 arrived, that question preoccupied the 93rd’s senior commanders and medical personnel.
 
WET AND FRIGID WEATHER FOLLOWED ON the heels of Arnold’s visit, postponing any reckoning for the battle-weary men of the 93rd. To pass the time, Doc Paine spent three hours on January 29 mending tears in his wind-whipped Stars and Stripes, using scraps of bandages to patch the holes. The patches didn’t hold in the fierce winds, and Paine would start using canvas threads to mend his beloved—and increasingly tattered—flag.
Paine was scheduled to join the welcoming party for a visit by Arnold’s new air chief for North Africa, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, but the visit was canceled because of poor flying conditions. Instead, the doctor spent part of the afternoon patching up the mangled toe of a pilot who’d accidentally shot himself while cleaning his pistol.
Despite more rain and cold winds on January 30, the 93rd managed to launch a dozen planes for a raid on Messina. The bombing was deemed a “great success” and was cause for celebration by senior officers who knocked back shots of VO Canadian whisky.
On Sunday, January 31, the weather finally cleared and the stir-crazy 93rd men emerged from their tents to exercise and perform chores. A series of air-raid alarms over recent days motivated Doc Paine to undertake an ambitious project to transform his foxhole into a bomb shelter. He procured two halves of fifty-five-gallon oil drums and sheets of canvas as cover and arranged them over his foxhole. He piled eight inches of dirt on top of the hardened shell before adding a final inspired touch: He planted desert flowers in the layer of dirt “to make the best and prettiest bomb shelter I’ve seen anywhere.”4
As satisfying as the men found the weather, even more welcome was a rumor that began making the rounds: The 93rd was finally returning to England. The news wasn’t official yet, but Ted Timberlake had been alerted to stand by for orders. To celebrate the long-awaited news, Doc Paine broke out a bottle of Scotch that he shared with comrades.
The timing of the rumors wasn’t a coincidence.
After persuading Prime Minister Churchill at the recently concluded Casablanca Conference to drop his opposition to the American daylight bombing campaign, Hap Arnold was determined to deliver on his promises. One of Churchill’s criticisms of the American campaign had been the modest achievements of Arnold’s forces, including the American failure to drop a single bomb on the German homeland after five months of raids. The RAF, by contrast, was already mounting thousand-plane raids on Berlin.
With a nudge from Arnold, Eaker wasted no time in addressing Churchill’s criticism.
On the same day that Arnold was mingling with the 93rd men at Gambut Main, Eaker dispatched ninety-one B-17 and B-24 bombers to attack the U-boat yards at Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Only fifty-three aircraft reached the target, but the message had been emphatically delivered—to the Germans and to Churchill. After months of tiptoeing around the fringes of the Third Reich, the Americans had finally hit the Nazi homeland, and they had lost only three bombers doing it.
As it turned out, the light losses had been a stroke of luck for the Americans. In fact, Eaker’s sudden willingness to roll the dice on an unescorted strike on German territory had caught the Luftwaffe by surprise. Unfortunately for the Americans, it wouldn’t happen again.
To meet Hap Arnold’s unreasonable expectations for the largely aspirational daylight bombing campaign, Eaker badly needed Ted Timberlake’s 93rd crews to fill holes in his depleted ranks. For the 93rd men, accustomed to the half-hearted enemy fighter resistance around the Mediterranean, the lion’s den beckoned.
 
DOC PAINE’S SCOTCH-SOAKED CELEBRATION of the 93rd’s return to England proved premature.
The first week of February came and went without the anticipated orders for the move. Another week passed without orders or further word. And then another.
The pace of raids on the Italian ports tailed off because of poor weather and overworked aircraft and crews. The 93rd was down to nineteen aircraft, and the Liberators still flying had gone without proper maintenance for more than two months. Sand-scoured engines failed more frequently, and that put crews in peril during missions and made it increasingly difficult for the airmen and their handful of mechanics and technicians to keep the B-24s battle ready.
The 93rd logged its first mission of the month on February 3. Ben and his crewmates didn’t see action until bombing Naples on February 7 and Palermo on February 10. They were Ben’s twelfth and thirteenth missions.
The men of the Epting crew could count themselves more fortunate than most of their comrades. Only two members of the crew—Ed Bates and Bill Dawley—had been injured thus far, and both Bates (frozen fingers) and Dawley (flak wound) had recovered and were flying again with the 93rd’s 329th Squadron back in England. Furthermore, Jake Epting and his men had avoided the ravages of combat stress that were creating holes in some crews.
The 93rd made it through the first two weeks of February without the loss of an aircraft or a single fatality. But the mounting losses of their new 98th and 376th Bomb Group neighbors at Gambut Main served as unnerving reminders to Ben and his comrades.
On February 4, generals Brereton and Patrick Timberlake flew in from Cairo for an awards ceremony for the 93rd men. They pinned various valor awards—the Distinguished Flying Cross for a few officers, the Purple Heart for several enlisted men who had sustained combat wounds, and the Air Medal for those who had completed five missions or Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster for those who had passed the ten-mission milestone. Among those honored and photographed were the combat-stressed pilots George Piburn and Robert Quinlivan.
More festivities followed on February 5 when the entire 93rd contingent assembled for a rousing review and retreat parade in honor of their operations officer, Major K. K. Compton, who had been tapped to take command of their Gambut Main neighbors, the 376th Bomb Group. The 93rd men were anxious to get back to England, but Compton would be making his home in the inhospitable North Africa desert for the foreseeable future.
 
THE RAINS OF LATE JANUARY AND EARLY February had complicated daily life for the men of the 93rd, but there was one delightful benefit: The wadis and escarpments around Gambut Main erupted with desert flowers. By Doc Paine’s count, there were no fewer than twenty-two varieties of flowers blooming in the area. Paine was among the men who marveled at the welcome burst of color on their target-shooting forays, which had become a favorite pastime of those officers who had procured German Luger pistols and Mauser rifles from Bedouin tribesmen.
The 376th had a recurrence of bad luck on February 7, when the groups at Gambut Main combined forces for a raid on Naples. Twelve 93rd crews, including Jake Epting’s Red Ass lads, were dispatched and returned safely; three 93rd men returned with mild cases of frostbite, and one officer had been wounded in the thigh with a piece of flak, which Doc Paine removed and sewed up. That was the extent of the group’s casualties. The 376th, on the other hand, had ten men killed in action when one of their bombers was shot down in the target area.
Despite the losses, Ken Cool was ecstatic. The raid’s exceptional accuracy would have justified the loss of all twenty bombers that reached the target, Cool enthused. BBC News echoed that view in a shortwave radio broadcast monitored at Gambut Main the following evening. It declared the strike “the best raid put on by any American bomber in the war.”5
On February 10, during their raid on Palermo, Ben and his crewmates experienced some anxious moments with the failure of one of their superchargers, the device that compensated for the loss of engine power at higher altitudes. Adding insult to injury, poor visibility forced the B-24s to drop their bombs in the sea rather than risk excessive civilian casualties, so the raid had been a waste. The Epting crew sweated out their solitary return flight to Gambut Main in the dark. They landed after seven hours and forty minutes of flight with the knowledge that the seemingly indestructible Red Ass was beginning to show the effects of two months of desert duty.
The men of the 93rd were also showing the effects. They had learned to live on little water and monotonously bland C-rations, and their uniforms, flying gear, and shoes were falling apart.6 The men had learned to supplement their diet by bartering with the locals for tangerines, lemons, oranges, and fresh eggs, but with those transactions came exposure to illnesses that were endemic in the Bedouin encampments and local villages.
With the passage of time, some of the men had become dangerously inured to the fact that they were living in the middle of a vast battlefield littered with unexploded ordnance and other hazards. Some bored airmen invented games with captured German ordnance by repurposing the explosives from antiaircraft shells for use in improvised fireworks displays.7 Around eleven in the morning on February 13, Doc Paine was in his tent reading a British spy novel when an explosion jolted him from his cot. He heard shouts and screams and emerged to witness a horrifying scene. Afterward, Paine distilled the mishap in a caustic diary entry: “Six dumb guys put an 88mm shell in a hole and threw rocks in on top to set it off and blow the hole deep enough for a latrine. It did. We hauled 4 to [a nearby] hospital in [an] ambulance. One lost his left eye and several were in foul shape from flak wounds.”8
 
AMID THE FRUSTRATING UNCERTAINTY about the group’s rumored return to England, the men mounted another mission on Monday, February 15. The target was Naples. It was the 93rd’s first mission in five days, and only the fourth of the month. Twelve crews were briefed at 10:00 a.m. and took off at 12:15 p.m. They were joined by nine B-24s of the 376th. Flying in formation, the two groups wheeled to the north for the Mediterranean crossing.
Problems arose soon after takeoff. Six of the twenty-one aircraft—two from the 93rd and four from the 376th—turned back with mechanical problems. The remaining bombers arrived over Naples at dusk, and were greeted by heavy flak and twelve to fifteen enemy fighters.
In the darkness and chaotic interplay of American bombers and German fighters, a 93rd B-24 named Cephalopod disappeared. Piloting the aircraft was a twenty-two-year-old Oklahoman, Lieutenant Charles T. Moore, affectionately known to his friends and fellow officers as Chub. When the last of the American bombers landed at Gambut Main around 11:00 p.m., Moore’s crew wasn’t among them. “He failed to return, but we hope he is in at Malta,” Doc Paine wrote after returning from the airfield.9
Overnight a radio message from Malta arrived: Charley Moore wasn’t there. The mood among the 93rd officers was already grim over Chub Moore’s disappearance when Ted Timberlake arrived from Cairo at noon with the latest from Ninth Air Force headquarters on the group’s fate. There were still “no orders to return us to England due to brass hats being void between the ears,” as Doc Paine paraphrased Timberlake’s report.10
Heartbroken over Chub Moore’s disappearance and incensed by headquarters indecision over the 93rd’s status, Doc Paine, Ken Cool, and Packy Roche tried to drown their sorrows in a bottle of Canadian Club whisky. Late in the afternoon, in what seemed like a feeble attempt to bolster 93rd morale, Pat Timberlake flew in to present medals to about thirty men. Doc Paine and Ken Cool were fed up. Each took a sedative from Paine’s dispensary and collapsed onto their cots at 7:30 p.m. for a long night’s sleep.
As the dispiriting week wore on, hopes for the return of Chub Moore and his men faded. “The general morale is at a low ebb due chiefly to the fact that no one knows what the score is,” Doc Paine groused. “Col. Ted has made no statement and all the men get is via damn rumor—which is bad.”11
At 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 18, the 93rd men made their way to the 376th encampment for another medal ceremony, this one presided over by General Brereton. Ken Cool and Packy Roche, among others, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, but the men couldn’t help but think about Chub Moore and his missing crew. Only a few days earlier, Moore had stood at attention at one of these ceremonies as he was decorated with an Oak Leaf Cluster added to his previous Air Medal. Standing to Moore’s left had been the pilot George Piburn. Now, Moore was dead, along with his entire crew—shot down near the target, the 93rd men would later learn—and Piburn was an emotional wreck who would never fly another combat mission.12
Afterward, Doc Paine overheard one of Brereton’s aides tell Timberlake that he was carrying orders that would send the 93rd back to England after one final mission. It was finally happening.
Thrilled by the news, Doc Paine joined the group’s pickup baseball game after lunch and for two hours ran around the field like a teenager rather than a slightly paunchy thirty-eight-year-old gentleman on the precipice of middle age. Still fired up that evening, he drank and sang into the wee hours. He would awaken in the morning with aching muscles, strained vocal cords, and a pounding head, yet still overjoyed at the knowledge that the 93rd’s time in this godforsaken station was coming to an end. No one in the 93rd would be happier to bid farewell to the desert than the gentleman doctor from Virginia.
 
BY MID-FEBRUARY, THE GROUND WAR in North Africa was centered in the rugged hills and valleys of central Tunisia. In January, the Americans and British had pushed eastward through the Grand Dorsal system of the Atlas Mountains, establishing a line that was only about sixty miles from Tunisia’s east coast in places. Faced with the threat of the Allies splitting his Tunisian bridgehead in half, Field Marshal Rommel attacked in early February. By the middle of the month, Rommel was poised to unleash the next phase of his long-shot attempt to conjure a victory over the Allies in Tunisia.
General von Arnim’s forces dislodged elements of the US 1st Armored Division in attacks that began February 14, and Rommel followed with attacks of his own that drove American troops back to the Western Dorsal, one of two roughly parallel mountain ranges that dominated the topography of central Tunisia. On February 19, Rommel and von Arnim combined their forces in an attempt to cripple the Americans at Kasserine Pass.
In the initial stages of the battle, the Americans retreated in disarray, falling back as far as fifty miles in places. Finally, on February 22, troops of the US Army’s II Corps, supplemented by British reinforcements, halted the German advance. Battered by heavy artillery and air attacks, Rommel abruptly ended the offensive. By February 24, after more US air strikes, Allied troops had reclaimed Kasserine Pass and regained the momentum in Tunisia.13
As the battle in the Kasserine Pass raged, weather grounded the 93rd crews. On Friday, February 19, the crews were briefed to bomb Naples, but the mission was canceled before takeoff because of poor weather in the target area. After lunch, the group ordnance officer was “tinkering with a M103 bomb fuse” when it exploded in his face, injuring his fingers and sending a steel splinter into his right eyeball.
The crews were briefed again and cleared for takeoff on Saturday, February 20. Their target again was Naples. En route to Italy, the crews received orders to turn east to their alternate target and dropped their bombs on a chemical factory in Crotone, along southern Italy’s Calabrian coast. It was another long mission—nine hours and thirty-five minutes for the Epting crew—but, most important of all, the 93rd returned with all its crews and without a single casualty. Ben would be returning to England with fourteen missions to his credit.
As Ben and his comrades celebrated their final mission in North Africa, American forces were fleeing westward from Kasserine Pass. Unknown to the men of the 93rd, their fate was tied to that of the retreating American ground forces. If the Axis forces continued to advance, the 93rd would have to remain in North Africa to help swing the tide of battle. But the crisis passed when Rommel withdrew his forces from Kasserine Pass. With the situation in Tunisia under control once more, generals Eisenhower and Spaatz released the 93rd from its temporary duty in North Africa. Orders were cut for Ted Timberlake and his men to return to England.
At one o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1943, Ken Cool guided Hot Freight down the Gambut Main runway for the final time and led the first flight of five 93rd bombers into the night sky. Doc Paine was among the passengers joining Cool on the flight. Their destination was Tafaraoui, Algeria, outside Oran, the soggy spot where the 93rd had briefly stopped before inclement weather drove them into the Libyan desert.
In the hour after Cool led his flight of B-24s away from Gambut Main, Jake Epting coaxed Red Ass into the sky for the first leg of the journey back to England. Nothing about Ben Kuroki’s military career had come easily, and so it would be with what was supposed to be a routine transit flight. As the long and harrowing night unfolded, Ben and his brothers-in-arms would wonder whether they would ever see another dawn.