Chapter 23
TUPELO LASS
Shortly after Ben and his comrades left for North Africa the previous December, the 93rd had departed Alconbury for another base to the east. The group was now flying out of US Army Air Forces Station 104, a triangle of runways and Nissen huts wedged amid the fields and pastures of East Anglia. In the nine-hundred-year-old market city of Norwich, eighteen miles inland from the English Channel, Ben and his three traveling companions exited the train station and boarded an army truck. Soon, the truck was rumbling along country lanes flanked by lush hedgerows. After a few minutes, the men could hear the sounds of aircraft engines. They turned off a road, passed a guard post, and rolled to a stop in front of a low-slung brick building.
The base had been carved from farms and pastures on the eastern fringe of the village of Hardwick, twelve miles due south of Norwich. Originally a temporary aerodrome, the facility had been upgraded to a fully equipped base and turned over to the Eighth Air Force in 1942. In addition to hangars, workshops, mess halls, and barracks, there were three runways laid out in a crisscross pattern that covered the points of the compass. The main runway stretched six thousand feet on a north-south axis. Two alternate runways were forty-two hundred feet in length. Farms, pastures, and patches of woods lay all around them. The setting seemed so pastoral that it was hard to imagine this as a war zone. Place names around the base added to the quaint ambiance: Topcroft Street, Spring Wood, Misery Corner, Hangman’s Hill, Websdill Wood, Castle Hill.
A road bisected the base, with the runways, hardstands, hangars, and technical shops to the west and the headquarters, mess halls, barracks, sick quarters, and recreational facilities to the east. After an official welcome, Ben was directed to the corrugated steel Nissen huts east of the headquarters that were home to the 409th Squadron. Officers lived separately from enlisted men, with two crews (eight officers or twelve enlisted men) sharing each half-moon-shaped hut. The men slept on iron cots, with mattresses stuffed with wood shavings. Each hut was heated by a “tortoise,” an English potbelly stove that sat in the middle of the room.
With more than thirteen miles of roadways, two hundred buildings, and two thousand men on the station, it took Ben a few days to get his bearings. West of the road lay the business end of the base: the control tower, three hangars, fire stations, the communications building, and a bomb dump. When they weren’t undergoing maintenance or repairs, the group’s B-24 Liberators were parked on fifty hardstands that fed into taxiways looped around the runways.
Ben was shocked by the sea of new faces. In his absence, the Eighth Air Force had set twenty-five missions as the duration of a combat tour. Some of his comrades had completed that number and moved on to other assignments in the United Kingdom, and the US replacements had begun to trickle in. The new guys were easy to spot.
Many of the veterans who had just completed their tours—and those who were nearing twenty-five missions—suffered from combat stress. Throughout the late winter and early spring, hopelessness had begun to permeate the ranks of the Eighth Air Force as losses rose. Medical officers documented the signs of depression and combat fatigue that became common in the spring of 1943. There was at least one suicide. Binge-drinking had emerged as another outlet for some combat-stressed men. “Our tactical units have been worn down about to the vanishing point, and their morale has reached a critical low,” General Ira Eaker’s aide-de-camp, James Parton, observed in March.1
About two weeks before Ben’s return to the 93rd, on April 16, the 93rd had experienced one of its most devastating days of the war. In a raid on the port of Brest, France, the 93rd lost thirty men on four crews, including nineteen killed in action or missing and never found, and eleven captured. There was an uneasiness in the air as Ben rejoined the 93rd.
BEN ALSO HAD A NEW AIRCRAFT TO GET used to. His beloved Red Ass was last seen taking off from Melilla, Spanish Morocco, a Spanish air force pilot at the controls as the battle-scarred bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean horizon. By the time Ben returned to the 93rd, Epting had broken in a new aircraft with a more elegant name: Tupelo Lass.
Ben flew his first mission in Tupelo Lass on May 17. Fifteen 93rd bombers joined with nineteen B-24s from the 44th Bomb Group to undertake the first all-Liberator raid by the Eighth Air Force: a raid on the French port city of Bordeaux. It was Ben’s fifteenth mission.
On May 29, after a twelve-day lull, the Epting crew was among the 93rd men assigned to bomb the German submarine pens in La Pallice harbor, on the Atlantic coast of France.
Ben was in his tail turret when disaster struck Tupelo Lass as they were approaching La Pallice at twenty-three thousand feet. The propeller blades on two engines began to windmill wildly, then all four engines stopped. Tupelo Lass fell into a sickening descent toward the sea. Epting sounded the alarm to prepare to abandon ship. Bombardier Al Naum dumped his bombs while Epting frantically tried to get the engines restarted. “This is it!” Epting shouted over the intercom. They were down to two thousand feet, only seconds from smashing into the Bay of Biscay, when the engines coughed to life. In a few seconds, Epting got Tupelo Lass under control and leveled off.2
Back on the ground, the men of the Epting crew tried to joke about their close call, but they were badly shaken. In their post-mission debriefing, the intelligence officer scribbled a note on the crew’s sortie report: “10 nervous wrecks. Candidates for rest home.”3
THE LA PALLICE RAID WAS THE FINAL mission for several 93rd men, and their departure only increased the sense of isolation for Ben and others who had arrived in England with the group the previous September. Ben was now at sixteen missions, and the sporadic rate of action in the 93rd meant that he probably wouldn’t reach twenty-five until the fall.
In the bigger picture, May had been a better month for Ira Eaker’s Eighth Air Force heavy bombers than April, when weather and casualties had limited his B-17s and B-24s to only four missions during the entire month, and only one raid to Germany—all while losing another twenty-eight aircraft. In May, the 93rd had logged nine missions, including four into Germany. As had been the case with the La Pallice raid, the group’s primary focus had been German submarine pens and construction yards, part of a larger effort to stem the loss of Allied shipping to German U-boats in the North Atlantic.
Another bright spot for Eaker and the Eighth Air Force during the month was the surge in replacement crews and aircraft arriving from the United States. Four new B-17 heavy bombardment groups had joined the Eighth in May, along with groups of replacement crews that were being sent to depleted units in the English countryside.
Ira Eaker had been losing men and crews at an accelerating pace because of rising casualties and the twenty-five-mission policy, but he was finally getting the infusion of new blood he had sought for months. The reinforcements were arriving just in time for the planned summer air offensive against Nazi Germany.
THE 93RD HAD HOSTED ANOTHER important visitor during May. Forty-seven-year-old Robert Abercrombie Lovett was a former Wall Street banker now serving as assistant secretary of war for air, and during a spring tour he had shared meals and cigars with commanders at B-17 and B-24 bases throughout England. He spent two days at Hardwick, quizzing Colonel Ted Timberlake and other 93rd officers and men about their eight months of combat against the Germans in three theaters. Lovett had already concluded that German fighter attacks revealed a potentially devastating vulnerability for the Eighth Air Force bombers and crews.
Lovett had been lured to the War Department in 1940 as a high-level troubleshooter and a minder of sorts to keep the volatile Hap Arnold out of trouble. A polished and charming patrician, Lovett was masterful at his work. By the spring of 1943, he was intimately familiar with Arnold’s foibles, and one blind spot in particular: Arnold’s stubborn belief that American B-17 and B-24 bombers could attack Nazi Germany without long-range escorts.
As Lovett gathered information from bomber crews and air commanders, Arnold was recuperating from his second heart attack since visiting with the men of the 93rd at Gambut Main in February. He had spent most of May resting and fishing in the Pacific Northwest. He had missed the ten-day TRIDENT war conference in Washington, DC, during which major decisions had been made about the summer priorities for the air campaign against Germany.
On his return to Washington on May 27, Arnold was briefed on all that had transpired in his absence. The news of a more productive month by Eaker’s bombers was encouraging, but the rising losses from German fighter attacks were a concern. Robert Lovett was due back in Washington in early June, and Arnold expected to learn much more about the state of affairs with the Eighth Air Force. Lovett had yet to put his thoughts to paper, but by the end of May, Hap Arnold’s troubleshooter had heard enough to conclude that the young airmen he had met during his tour of bomber bases in East Anglia faced a grim reckoning in the months ahead.