When you were on missions you had no time to think. "You"re so busy handling that plane and staying in formation and watching the fuel supply - making sure the gauges are not giving any trouble - that it really kept you occupied. You had to keep all four of those engines working, synchronized, proper oil pressure, temperature, and keeping that big bomber in formation at all times - you had about all you could handle. In a sense the pilot was insulated from the war. You had a perfect view of the flak - you could see the puffs out in front of you, the flashes of red and black. You could feel the plane shudder better than anyone else. So you knew there was a war going on but you had only an indirect relationship to what was being done by the bomber-you couldn"t see the target and you were 25,000 feet away from the action on the ground. There was the explosion of the flak sh.e.l.ls all around you, but you had no weapon to shoot back with and you didn"t have the toggle switch. You didn"t have the navigator"s view of where you were going."
Recalling his mission over Vienna on February 21, McGovern said that until then he had felt "a sort of nagging and anxiety on takeoffs and turbulent air and hoping that all the mechanics were working right.
But on that day everything seemed to go smoothly - and it just dawned on me that I had largely overcome any fear that I had previously had about flying."5 As Cooper had remarked, and as every crew member of theDakota Queen later testified, McGovern was a serious, mature officer. The responsibilities he carried on every mission - for that big, expensive plane, for getting it over the target tightly packed into the formation, for the lives of his crew - were much bigger and more serious than twenty-two-year-old men ever carry in civilian life. But there was a war on, and those were his responsibilities. Lt. Cmdr. Edgar D. Hoagland, USNR, a PT boat skipper and later commander of a squadron of PT boats at an age when he should have been going to college, spoke for all pilots, infantry company and platoon leaders, and naval skippers when he wrote in his war memoir, "A destroyer of anxiety and fear is the fierce, overwhelming desire to take care of your men. The more responsibility you have in a combat situation, the easier it is to remain cool and resolute. . . . Fear is more than balanced out by the exhilaration of danger, which puts every sense on full alert and makes you feel supremely alive.
Then, after conquering a dangerous situation, you are left fulfilled and confident beyond description."6 Eleanor was due to have her baby in mid-March. McGovern wrote her, and she him, every day. But it took more than a week for the letters to be delivered. On March 14, McGovern and his crew were awakened at 4:00 A.M. The stars were out. It promised to be a clear, bright day. After breakfast, they walked over to the briefing room and joined about 300 other airmen to sit on the planks laid across cinder blocks. The target that was marked this time was Vienna. The alternate target, also marked, was Wiener Neustadt. If Vienna was clear, the bombs should be dropped on an oil refinery. If it was not and Wiener Neustadt became the choice, the target was marshaling yards. The weather officer took over. He described the likely conditions between Cerignola and Vienna and what to expect over the target. He said there could be a storm over the city or on the way to it, and the clouds might build too high for the formation to fly over them. If that proved to be the case, the alternate would be bombed. He thought the weather conditions over Wiener Neustadt might be better. He described the weather conditions to 96 expect on the way home. Another officer mounted the platform to tell the airmen what they were going after and why. He explained the need to hit the refineries or, if necessary, the marshaling yards. If it was Vienna, he told them to stay well away from St. Steven"s Cathedral, the Opera House, the Palace and other historic buildings, and schools.* At Wiener Neustadt, the marshaling yards carried north-south rail traffic moving to Munich, Vienna, or elsewhere. Group commander Col. William Snowden would lead the mission, which was about the first piece of news that morning that pleased everyone. The last briefing was on how to form up. At the hard stand, McGovern inspected his plane as his crew got in. Then he pulled himself up and climbed into the pilot"s seat. TheDakota Queen taxied, took off, began to climb and circle over the Adriatic, and after an hour of flying, having reached 20,000 feet, got into formation.
There were forty-two B-24s, twenty-one from the 455th Bomb Group, twenty-one from the 454th.
They flew as squadrons, seven planes in each, in a diamond formation. They set off for Vienna, still gaining alt.i.tude, to 25,000 feet. The day was clear until the formation started to approach Vienna, but over the city the weather had built up into a storm and Colonel Snowden decided it was too dangerous to risk losing his bombers when he couldn"t see the target, which also added the additional hazard of possibly hitting the monuments in the city, or schools and hospitals. He began a slow, 180-degree turn toward the alternate. That made every pilot and his crew following Snowden happy - Vienna, as usual, meant heavy and accurate flak, while there would be none at Wiener Neustadt. There was some cloud cover at Wiener Neustadt but Snowden"s radar could pick up the marshaling yards. Everyone dropped their bombs right after he did, and the formation turned for home. It would be a milk run. But in the middle of the turn, Sergeant Higgins called up to Lieutenant McGovern on the intercom. The last of the ten 500-pound bombs they were carrying had lodged in the bomb rack. McGovern thought about it for a minute. Landing theDakota Queen in that situation would be suicide. "Well look, we can"t land this way with a live bomb in the rack. Either you guys gotta get rid of the bomb or we"re going to have to bail out when we get back within reasonable distance of Cerignola. I"m not going to take this bomber down with a bomb in the rack." The crew left the bomb bay doors open and Sergeant McAfee and Lieutenant Cooper went to work, trying to trigger the little steel catches on each end of the bomb, hoping to pry them open so the bomb would drop. McGovern remembered: "It was scary as h.e.l.l. If the plane suddenly made a lunge when the 500-pound bomb dropped . . ."
McAfee and Cooper were doing their work standing on the cat-walk, less than a foot wide, hanging in the center of the bomb bay. McGovern looked behind him to see how they were doing, "but about all I could see was the top of their heads and their backs."7 The danger was acute. McGovern had heard the story told by Sgt. Art Applin, a tail gunner on a B-24. Once after turning away from a mission over Munich, Applin had seen a Liberator on his wing. The bomb bay doors were open. As Applin related, "One of the crew was standing right at the end of the catwalk relieving himself out of the bomb bay and an 88 sh.e.l.l exploded below him and it cracked the cat-walk and he fell out. When he did, the heel of his foot got caught in this crack and I saw him dangling there and I called the pilot on the intercom. I couldn"t communicate with the plane on the wing but our pilot could. I told him about the situation and he called the pilot on the other plane and his crew pulled the fellow in. Naturally he didn"t have his parachute on.
He was lucky he made it that day."8 As McAfee and Cooper labored, McGovern throttled back to slow down theDakota Queen and they began to lose alt.i.tude. "I didn"t want to drop a bomb in front of other airplanes," he explained. "Also, I wanted to give McAfee and Cooper undivided time. I didn"t know how long it would take to get rid of the bomb. Keep in mind that I had to know all this stuff to survive.
Whereas the other guys, their feeling was, "George will take care of us."" TheDakota Queen descended to 12,000 feet, several thousand feet below the formation, which was pulling ahead in any case. Then Cooper yelled something "and all of a sudden the plane jumped and I knew the bomb had been cut loose." They were approaching the Austrian-Italian border. McGovern watched the bomb descend, "a luxury you didn"t have at 25,000 feet. It went down and hit right on a farm in that beautiful, green part of Austria. It was almost like a mushroom, a big, gigantic mushroom. It just withered the house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank.Everything was just leveled. It couldn"t have come in more perfectly. If we had been trying to hit it we couldn"t have hit it as square. You could see stuff flying through the air and 97 a cloud of black smoke."9 Sergeant Higgins watched the bomb descend. He commented, "It just blew that farm to smithereens. We didn"t mean to do that, we certainly didn"t try to do that."10 McGovern glanced at his watch. It was high noon. He came from South Dakota. He knew what time farmers eat. "I got a sickening feeling. Here was this peaceful area. They thought they were safely out of the war zone.
Nothing there, no city, no railyard, nothing. Just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war, just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach."11 Navigator Lt. Roland Pepin had a similar experience. On a bombing run over Munich, the last bomb in his plane got stuck. "We were on our return, flying over the Alps. The crew chief and the bombardier were successful in releasing the bomb. I viewed it descending and watched in horror as it landed in the center of a small village and destroyed it. It was a Sunday, midmorning, and I could not help but feel the deepest remorse and shameful guilt for the people of the village. Following this mishap, I couldn"t sleep. I was in a stupor and couldn"t get these innocent people out of my mind. I was cracking up and didn"t know it. My pilot, Lieutenant Barnhill, ordered me to drink about half a bottle of whiskey. I pa.s.sed out and slept for eighteen hours. Other members of the crew felt as I did. We were all getting jumpy and tired. The surgeon ordered us to take ten days off on the Isle of Capri."12 After the bomb fell, McGovern closed the bomb bay doors and headed home. On the intercom, he and Cooper talked. McGovern asked, "What"s the highest elevation between here and where we are going?"
Cooper looked at his map, did his calculations, and replied, "Eight thousand feet, George. Eight thousand feet." In an interview, he admitted, "Actually it was only 7,000 feet, but I added another 1,000 feet because I was engaged to get married." Cooper grinned, then added, "As George was expecting his first child, he added another 1,000 feet on top of that."13 Back at Cerignola, it was an easy landing.
There had been no flak on the milk run over Wiener Neustadt. There was not even a scratch on theDakota Queen. No one had been hurt. McGovern jumped into a truck and rode over to the debriefing area, where the Red Cross women gave him coffee and a doughnut. An intelligence officer came running up to him - the same officer who had handed him a cable back in December that told him his father had died. This time, however, the officer was grinning from ear to ear. As he handed a cable to McGovern, he said, "Congratulations, Daddy, you now have a baby daughter." The cable was from Eleanor. Their first baby, whom she named Ann Marion, had been born four days before, on March 10, in the Mitch.e.l.l Methodist Hospital. Eleanor concluded the cable, "Child doing well. Love, Eleanor." "I was just ecstatic," McGovern said. "Jubilant." But then he thought, Eleanor and I have brought a new child into the world today - at least I learned about it today - and I probably killed somebody else"s kids right at lunchtime. h.e.l.l, why did that bomb have to hit there?
He went over to the officers club and had a drink - cheap red wine. He was toasted and cheered. But, he later said, "It really did make me feel different for the rest of the war. Now I was a father, I had not only a wife back home but a little girl, all the more reason why I wanted to get home and see that child."
He returned to his tent and wrote Eleanor a long letter. He did not mention the farmhouse, but he couldn"t get it out of his mind. "That thing stayed with me for years and years. If I thought about the war almost invariably I would think about that farm."14 Two days after the mission to Wiener Neustadt, theDakota Queen flew again with the 455th, accompanied by the 454th. The primary target was weathered in so the Liberators dropped their bombs on the marshaling yards at Amstetten, Austria. The lead bomber, using its radar and flying out in front and a bit above theDakota Queen, dropped its bombs.
Cooper, acting as bombardier as well as navigator, tried to toggle his bombs so that they would strike in the same place. But the bombs were stuck. Cooper went to work and managed to free them, but by the time he toggled the eggs on theDakota Queen it had flown over the river. The bombs landed on the other side. At the debriefing, Cooper told what had happened and why. He was informed that the bombs had dropped on a prisoner of war camp. Cooper and McGovern were devastated. There were American soldiers in the camp. For some months thereafter just thinking about it brought tears to Cooper"s eyes.
But in 1946, when Cooper was going to graduate school at Texas A&M, he met an Army Air Forces officer who had been a prisoner in the camp. They got to talking about the incident, and the former POW 98 said, "I was there, and when you dropped those bombs one hit the fence, it opened it up and in all the confusion some of us got away and managed to join the Russians."15 Three days later McGovern and his crew flew again. The target was the marshaling yards at Muhldorf, Germany. The group dropped over 116 tons of bombs, with good results - over 55 percent fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point.
There was no flak. On March 21 it was back up into the sky - the third day in a row for the group, McGovern"s second mission in three days. Some ninety-four tons of bombs were dropped, with outstanding accuracy-over 87 percent fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point.
The following day, March 22, it was up again, target the oil refinery at Kralupy, Czechoslovakia - the group being escorted by P-51s. The formation got to within 125 miles of Berlin. The next day Cooper described what had happened in a note home. It had been a long mission, he said, altogether taking eight hours and twenty minutes after spending an hour forming up. "When we got back to the place we could come down from alt.i.tude," he wrote, "we had been on oxygen for four and a half hours and our supply was almost exhausted. There wasn"t any real danger because any time Mac wants to come down from alt.i.tude, I know the area well enough I can bring him around all the flak. Funny - he doesn"t worry when I"m navigating and I never worry when he"s the pilot. Several times he"s proved what a cool-headed and superior pilot he is."16 On March 25 the group took off for its seventh straight day of flying missions - theDakota Queen was there, McGovern"s fifth flight since March 16. It was his twenty-sixth mission, five ahead of the crew. The target was a tank factory in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Thirty-six Liberators dropped ninety-six tons of bombs, with good results. Flak was moderate but accurate - three aircraft were hit but managed to get back to Cerignola. Cooper wrote, "After yesterday"s mission, Mac said he was lucky he got me and trusts me - doesn"t worry when I"m with him. I feel the same way about him so we make a good team. I put him in for the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] for a couple of planes he"s brought back safe."
That didn"t work, as McGovern already had a DFC.17 On March 31, Cooper was relaxing in the officers club, sitting in an easy chair, daydreaming. Another officer came in and told him, "Congratulations." He had just won a $500 war bond. He explained to his mother that it came as a result of an Easter drive drawing: "Each member of the squadron selected a number between 1 and 375 and paid a dollar. I selected the number of the plane that has been damaged a couple of times and brought Mac and Crew home safely." It was the last three numbers of the serial number of the bomber, 279. "I hope the luck holds as well in the air as it did on the ground."18 March was over. The group had flown twenty-six missions, putting 719 aircraft over the target areas, and dropped 1,376 tons of bombs. No enemy fighters had been seen, but two aircraft had been shot down by flak. In addition, six crew members had been severely wounded while three others had minor wounds.
The group"s history commented, "The concentration of flak around the major targets seemed to be increasing as the Germans appeared to be "circling their wagons" for the final attacks."19 *A few decades later, McGovern was in Vienna and visited St. Steven"s. It had taken some damage from high explosives. But he was certain that no American bombs had hit it and was relieved when he discovered that it had been hit by Russian artillery.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Linz: The Last Mission.
April 1945 ON APRIL 1, APRIL FOOL"S DAY, theDakota Queen flew a mission to Kreglach, Austria, to bomb the railroad bridge there. Some twenty-seven B-24s dropped seventy-eight tons of bombs, but could not see the results because of smoke in the target area. It was a milk run - no flak, no jets, no other enemy fighters. All planes returned safely. McGovern and his crew stood down for the next ten days. On April 11 they flew again. The target was the railroad bridge at Ponte Gardena, Italy, but the 741st Squadron, plus two others, turned away because of cloud cover and instead went after the alternate target, the fuel depot at Goito, Italy. Flak was moderate, although one Liberator got hit badly enough that the controls were damaged to such an extent that the pilot took the plane to Switzerland. McGovern and the others got back to Cerignola. The 455th flew eleven missions in the first twelve days of April, but none on April 13. McGovern was at the officers club that day. He recalled that the deputy squadron commander, Capt.
Andrew Gramm, came into the club to announce, "d.a.m.n, you"re not going to believe what just happened - the big guy died - Franklin Roosevelt, our commander in chief died. The war is over. The war is lost."
The other officers, although they were shocked, thought Gramm was overreacting in saying the war was lost. They consoled him and finally convinced him that the war was not lost. Gramm, who was a heavy drinker anyway, took a few good belts to ease the pain of Roosevelt"s death.
After the liquor had begun to do its work, Gramm climbed up on the bar, which was about four feet high. He was a big man, weighed about 225 pounds. Standing on the bar, he said, "Now you guys catch me." He closed his eyes and fell forward. "He didn"t know if the others were going to catch him or not but he didn"t seem to care," McGovern said. "But they did - three or four guys did - practically broke their backs trying to. He repeated that four or five times. Finally a guy says, "Look we"re not going to do that again. We"ve had enough of this. You may not have to fly tomorrow but we do."" McGovern added that he remembered the incident vividly "because it just struck me about how close we really were. Here we were 3,000 miles from home and yet the death of Roosevelt hit that group of men awfully hard. They weren"t particularly political - it"s just that they hadn"t known any other president."1 McGovern flew again on April 15, then again on April 16, 17, and 18 - four missions in four days. By this time the marshaling yards and oil refineries had been hit so often, and so effectively, that they were no longer the primary targets. Instead the Liberators partic.i.p.ated in the drive up the Italian peninsula by engaging in tactical bombing, that is, giving direct and indirect support to the ground troops. The technique was to drop the bombs just ahead of the American troop lines, or to hit bridges to stop enemy ground transportation. Rather than the usual 500- or 1,000-pound bombs, the planes carried 250-pound general purpose bombs.
At the briefings, McGovern said, the officer in command would tell them that the campaign was being coordinated with the American ground forces. "We were told to fly until we were directly over the cutting edge of the American forces and were told that there would be smoke signals there, and there were. The Americans would set off the signals along the front of their line, and we were to drop right on that, so the forward motion of the bombs would carry them well ahead of the American forces." Another technique was to use white markers set along the front lines, 100 yards in length and 1,000 yards apart, to mark the location of the American troops. The bomber stream flew perpendicular to the line of troops. Dropping the bombs when they saw the smoke and/or the white lines, the Liberators put them down right on top of the Germans dug in on the other side. At the briefing the following morning, the officer in charge would congratulate the crews. "Well, men, we did okay yesterday. We put those eggs right where we wanted them, and we"re going to go back today and do it some more. The guys on the ground are indebted to us, and we want to be careful not to hit any of them. But we"re going to try to make their way easier."
They did. McGovern later talked to some of the infantry officers, who told him that the B-24s provided great a.s.sistance.
100 The Liberators came in perpendicular to avoid flak. Ground commanders wanted them to fly parallel to the lines, but the AAF refused, on the grounds that if they did every German gunner along the line would be firing at the bombers. By coming in perpendicular, the B-24s were over the line for just a second or two, depriving the Germans of a chance to fix their radar, aim, and fire. Nevertheless, these were no milk runs. They were flying over the high Alps, near the Brenner Pa.s.s, and to ensure accuracy they were flying at 15,000 feet, low for the Liberators. The Germans had their 88s placed close to the mountaintops, at 12,000 or more feet. As this was so close to the front lines, the Germans had heavier artillery, 105 and 150 mms, firing at the planes. The German gunners, in McGovern"s memory, "were shooting crossfire at us instead of shooting at us from ground zero to our usual alt.i.tude of 25,000 feet." When the planes were at 15,000 feet and the flak gunners were nearly that high, McGovern said, "that"s a pretty good shot.
They can really home in on you. And they did." He saw at least two planes get hit.2 From April 19 to April 22, McGovern stood down. On the twenty-third he flew theDakota Queen again, against road bridges in the Alps. This time, there was no flak - a milk run. On the twenty-fourth, the 455th turned away from the primary target and went after the alternate, marshaling yards and an ammunition dump at Ossopo, Italy. Results were good, the flak was slight and inaccurate. All planes got home safely. It was McGovern"s thirty-fourth mission. "I hated Linz as a target," McGovern declared. To begin with, it was heavily defended because it was an important rail hub for the Germans. Through Linz, German troops moved back and forth from the eastern to the western front - boxcars, pa.s.senger cars, everything. Linz was. .h.i.tler"s hometown. The 455th Group had hit it often. "I don"t know how they could ever get a train in or out of that place," McGovern said, "but apparently they did, because we kept hitting it." He had been on the December 15, 1944, mission to Linz. It was his seventh mission, his second as pilot. "It was just deadly fear with me from that day on. I never talked about it much but I was scared to death with those sh.e.l.ls going off. There was nothing you could do. Couldn"t take evasive action, couldn"t dodge them." It was on that mission that a piece of shrapnel had burst through the c.o.c.kpit window and come within inches of killing him. Now, on April 25, 1945, they were to go back. Before the men climbed into theDakota Queen, McGovern spoke to them. He said it was usual to allow a pilot to go on a milk run for his last mission because the commanders did not want a pilot shot down on that one. But the target was Linz. Although he wanted to fly the mission, he said he did not want to endanger the crew just because he chose to fly it. He put it up to a vote. If the vote was negative, McGovern said no one would ever fault them, including him, and the commanders would excuse them. Ashlock remembered, "We voted to fly the mission." So they were off.3 All four squadrons of the 455th Group flew to Linz. Cooper recalled, "We had every plane that we could get airborne up there." Picture them at takeoff: one B-24 breaking ground, one halfway down the runway, picking up speed, a third releasing brakes after applying power.
The men had been told at the briefing to expect heavy flak, as the Germans were bringing all their 88s back to protect their priority targets. The briefing officer said, "Our estimates are that there are 380 antiaircraft guns in Linz, and they"re heavily concentrated." The weather was clear. After forming up, the group set off over the Alps to the target. To McGovern, "It was exciting going across the mountains.
Those enormous snow-peaked mountains - and the endless meadows and fields, the trees and rivers and streams." Thinking back, he commented, "Europe is beautiful - except over the d.a.m.n targets. It was our worst mission of the war." According to the 455th"s history, the flak over the target was "extremely intense." The Germans were using their box system - firing the 88s" sh.e.l.ls into an area 2,000 feet on each of the four sides and 2,000 feet deep, just in front of the formation so that the planes would fly into it.
"The sky just became solid black. Then in that solid black you"d see these huge, angry flashes of red, which was another sh.e.l.l exploding. How we avoided it, I"ll never know." TheDakota Queen didn"t avoid it all. McGovern said he could hear the shrapnel "smacking the side of the plane."
"It was terrible," McGovern said. "Linz was tougher on my last mission than it had been on my second as pilot. h.e.l.l can"t be any worse than that. And remember, the people flying the plane or shooting the guns are children." Rounds and Higgins were twenty years old, and except for Cooper and engineer Valko the others were nineteen. Valko got into the c.o.c.kpit and stood between McGovern and Rounds.
101 "You could look at him and he seemed petrified," McGovern recalled. "Not just paralyzed, but petrified.
Just sheer terror."4 "The first thing that I remember," said Cooper, "is this whomping. They had zeroed in on us. We were in their box right in the middle." A piece of shrapnel came through the nose. It pa.s.sed through Cooper"s map. On it he had made a "real tiny little pencil mark indicating our base at Cerignola, and I"m d.a.m.ned if those Germans didn"t just put that piece of flak right through Cerignola." Another piece of flak hit the hydraulic lines. The red fluid began spurting out. It looked like blood. Cooper took off his flak helmet to attempt to catch some of that fluid so they could use it after patching the line, but he was "slipping and sliding around in that stuff." The nose gunner saw him floundering around in what he thought was blood and cried, "Oh, no!" He tried to help, but Cooper shook him off. But the hydraulic lines were so mangled they were beyond repair, so the fluid Cooper had caught was useless.5 One piece of flak hit Ashlock. It traveled up his leg from the knee to lodge in his b.u.t.t. Higgins went to apply first aid.
Ashlock was hollering, Cooper was hollering, so too everyone else. McGovern got on the intercom. His voice was calm as he told everyone to be quiet. That quieted them down. Then he ordered Valko to check the airplane to try to see how much damage had been done. He did, and except for the loss of the hydraulic lines, Valko said the plane was more or less okay. McGovern then asked each crew member to check in. Except Ashlock, they said one by one that they were okay. As he turned away from the target, McGovern saw that the number three engine had been damaged and he feathered the prop.
Higgins ripped open Ashlock"s pants. He examined the wound and told Ashlock it wasn"t too bad.
Because of the alt.i.tude and the cold, the blood had coagulated. Higgins poured powdered sulfa on the wound, then put a bandage around it. Higgins recalled that his patient "was making quite a racket on the intercom, so I finally just unplugged him." He gave Ashlock a shot of morphine and he lay down on the floor, where he stayed.
TheDakota Queen had slowed and lost alt.i.tude. It was now behind and below the formation. McGovern and Rounds got Cooper on the intercom and they discussed their alternatives. There were two: try to get back to Cerignola or turn east and try to land behind the Russian lines. With the hydraulic system a wreck, they had no brakes. The flaps were inoperative. An engine was missing. Nevertheless, they decided to head home.
As they got close, McGovern got on the radio with the tower, to describe his situation. The last squadron from the formation was landing - one plane at the far end of the runway turning off, another rolling halfway down the runway, and a third touching down. The officer in charge at the tower was glad to hear from theDakota Queen, which had already been listed as missing in action. He told McGovern he had a number of choices: he could go out over the Adriatic sh.o.r.eline and attempt a crash landing, or ditch in the sea, or bail out, or try to land on the runway. McGovern decided to accept the last alternative. On the intercom, he told the crew that if any one of them, or all of them, wanted to bail out they should feel perfectly free to do so. There would be no reflection on them: "If they felt safer bailing out it was fine with me." What are you going to do, the men asked. "I"m going to land this airplane," he replied. So they all decided to stay. As they approached the field, Higgins fired a red flare to indicate an ambulance should be ready to receive a wounded man.
McGovern ordered Higgins and McAfee to attach a pair of parachutes by their harnesses to the yokes supporting the waist guns. They were to throw them out the windows when he told them to, then pull the rip cord. That would slow the plane, which had no brakes. It was a technique that McGovern had not previously used, but had heard about (and indeed another B-24 from the group used the parachute method of stopping that day).
The crew used the hand crank to lower the wheels - an exhausting process, but between them Valko, Higgins, and Cooper managed to get it done. A little yellow signal came on to tell McGovern that the wheels were locked. The tower waved other planes off and told McGovern to come right on in. He was 102 afraid to come in slow "because if we were short of the field I didn"t think we could go around again. We were low on gas and I had one engine out." He came in too high "because of my fear of falling short of the field. I thought the worse thing that could happen was if I had to accelerate at the last minute. So I came in on a kind of flat landing, but considerably above the stalling speed." When theDakota Queen touched down, McGovern cut the throttles and ordered McAfee and Higgins to throw out the parachutes and pull the rip cords. When the chutes billowed open, McGovern could feel the plane slow down.
Instinctively, he and Rounds were pushing as hard as they could on the brake pedals, even though they had no brakes. But the engines, without power, provided some drag. McGovern had ordered the crew to go to the tail of the plane when it touched down, in order to bring the tail down so it would provide drag. Led by Cooper, they did. Seven of them, all but Ashlock and Rounds. McGovern thought the weight would bring the tail to the ground and stop the plane, but it didn"t work. He later commented, "That B-24 was just too big and ma.s.sive for even seven guys sitting in the tail to dump it back." The plane"s nose at the end of the runway did a little plunge into a ditch. Then it started up on the other side of the ditch, and the tail went up, then crashed down. "It was quite a jar," Cooper recalled. But it stopped the plane.
"It wasn"t one of my better landings," McGovern said. "It was too hot. I came in too fast. But I didn"t want to take any chance on stalling out. I wanted to make sure that we got that plane on the ground without any screwup." Shaking his head at the thought, he added, "If I ever made that landing again, I would have made it slower."
The ambulance was there. The crew lifted Ashlock off the plane and put him on a stretcher. Cooper limped off - he had sprained his ankle at the jolt when the tail dropped down. Otherwise, everyone was okay, although Valko was so badly shaken that he was confined to a hospital with battle fatigue for some months thereafter.
TheDakota Queen had 110 holes in its fuselage and wings. McGovern said, "I couldn"t believe it. If you had looked at that airplane, you would not have known how it stayed in the air." But he had brought it in.
Ken Higgins summed it up: "I always said George brought me home. He did that day."6 The following day, Cooper wrote his fiancee. He had retrieved one of the parachutes, and told her, "Your worries about a wedding dress are over - that is, if you want one made of white silk." He described the mission, then said, "Actually I was too busy to be scared so it was all o.k."7 Another mission to Linz was scheduled for April 26. McGovern would not be going on it, as he had completed his thirty-five missions, but others would. They woke, went to the briefing, got into their Liberators, and hoped for a red flare from the tower signifying that the mission was canceled. Pilots started their engines. Then shouts of joy could be heard all over Cerignola - the red flare had been fired. As it turned out, the war was over for the combat crews. It was over for every member of the Eighth and Fifteenth and Twelfth and Ninth Air Forces. No more missions. Less than two weeks later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. It was a hot, sunny day in Cerignola. Very little celebrating was done. Most of the men just took it easy, getting a suntan and listening to all the notables on their radios. Somehow, the accolades sounded hollow, as praise often does. It was a poor replacement for the thoughts of those who had made the supreme sacrifice with their lives.8 The group had started 1945 with sixty Liberators. In the next four months it had flown 1,434 sorties. In that period it lost eight B-24s to flak and another thirty-four received flak damage. A total of seventy-four crewmen were missing in action, plus twenty wounded and sixteen killed. In its fifteen months in action, the group had flown enough miles on combat missions to circle the earth over ten times with a thirty-airplane formation. It had flown altogether a total of 252 combat missions, lost 118 Liberators. It had suffered nearly 1,000 casualties - men killed in action, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner. The best news was, of course, that the Allies had won the war. A close second for the airmen was the release of the POWs. That was a joyous occasion. Lt. Col. Thomas Ramey of the 743rd Squadron, himself a POW, related: "We had 179 airmen lost from burning planes, ditching in icy cold water, crash-landing on rugged mountain terrain, often times wounded, only to 103 become captured American POWs. [What they endured included] starvation diets, deprivation, abuse, humiliation, vermin-infested quarters, forced marches in sub-zero weather, considerable weight loss, inadequate or no medical attention, infamous German box car rides, and in many cases, torture." But then "the sounds of war came closer and closer until one day when armored tank columns overran the camps and the American flag flew once again." That was a joyous occasion.9 Fifty-four years after the end of the war in Europe, Ken Higgins - who was nineteen years old in 1945 - spoke for many of his fellow airmen, and for many other veterans of all the armed services, when he said, "The war time was kind of unreal when I look back on it. It"s hard to imagine that we went through all that."10 McGovern and his fellow men of the 741st Squadron had played a small role in one of mankind"s greatest triumphs, the defeat of n.a.z.i Germany. They had been a part of one of history"s greatest undertakings, the Army Air Forces of World War II. After the war, there were disputes and arguments over which American service had done the most to bring about the victory. The ground forces, the Navy, and the AAF each a.s.serted that "without us, it couldn"t have been done. We were indispensable." The Army Air Forces claimed that they could have won the war alone. But then, so did the Navy. The Army ground forces replied that the AAF"s power to destroy was not the power to control. To control, it is necessary to put a man on the spot with a gun in his hand.
General Eisenhower, who commanded all three services in the campaign in northwest Europe, knew that it took all three to win. His ground forces could not have gotten to the battle without the Navy. Nor could they have driven through France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany without the Army Air Forces. As the supreme commander of the Army, Navy, and AAF in the campaign, he became so concerned with the service rivalries that at one time - this was before the establishment of the Air Force Academy in Colorado - he wanted midshipmen and cadets to attend the other service"s schools during their second cla.s.s years. He talked about having them wear the same uniforms. He even proposed a single service academy. What he proposed never came to be, but it illuminates the answer to the question of which service was indispensable. They all were. Critics of the AAF, while praising the tactical airplanes for their role in supporting the ground offensive, argued that the strategic bombing campaign was an unnecessary waste. All the production devoted to building the bombers, the enormous effort to train men to fly and maintain them, could have been better spent on fighters, ground troops, and the Navy. And it would have avoided the worst accusation of all, that in World War II the United States used a method of making war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed uncountable historic buildings, factories, and residences, without doing much of anything to win the war while creating the worst legacy of the war, made much more frightful with the development of the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War - making civilians into targets. Perhaps 305,000 Germans were killed in the bombings, another 780,000 seriously injured. About 25 million Germans had been subjected to the terror of the bombings.
The bombs. .h.i.t residences as well as factories, deliberately on the part of the RAF Bomber Command"s night bombing, but also from the American precision bombing. The accuracy of free-falling bombs was far below the accuracy of artillery fire, not to mention rifle or machine gun fire. Most bombs fell considerably outside the target. After the war, a Polish officer who had been captured in 1939 by the Germans and spent the war in a POW camp near Munich, then immigrated to the United States, was talking to B-24 tail gunner Sgt. Art Applin. The Polish officer said, "You know, when you guys would come over we would all run out of the barracks and start waving, screaming, and cheering and the German guards were trying to shut us up and get us back in the barracks." He then asked Applin, "Did you guys ever hit anything?" Applin"s reply was, "Yeah, we always. .h.i.t the ground."11 They did a lot better than that. In the last chapter, "Mission Accomplished," in the official history of the Army Air Forces in Europe, editors W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate give their a.s.sessment. Like all their work, it is judicious and authoritative. Much of the chapter is based on interviews conducted with German personnel after the unconditional surrender. The AAF wanted to know what they had done right, what was done wrong. The Germans were eager to talk, most of them. They knew there was little to be gained from withholding information. They were professionals in the art of war and wanted to discuss what had 104 happened, and why. Some of them, no doubt, hoped to win better treatment for themselves by being cooperative. But whatever their motivations, they provided a unique glimpse of the other side of the hill.
TheLuftwaffe commander, Hermann Gring, was voluble. His overall conclusion was that the Allied selection of targets had been excellent. He insisted that precision bombing was more effective than night raids. Still, he concluded that Germany could never have been defeated by airpower alone. But n.a.z.i Germany"s second and last fuhrer, Grand Admiral Karl Dnitz, said that airpower was the decisive element. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt believed that air-power was the first of several ingredients in the triumph of the Allies. Colonel General Alfred Jdl of Hitler"s staff said the winning of air superiority altogether decided the war and that strategic bombing was the most decisive factor. Albert Speer, the minister of production, emphatically stated his opinion that the strategic bombing could have won the war without a land invasion. The German leaders said that the Allies had underestimated Germany"s industrial capacity. It was so huge that Germany had been able to mobilize at a leisurely pace. Her war production continued to increase until it reached its peak in mid-1944. But it was then that the strategic bombing campaign intensified. Of all the bombs that struck the Reich during the war, 72 percent fell after July 1, 1944. In the following nine months the bombing campaign wrecked the enlarged German economy until it could not support military operations or supply the basic needs of the population. By January 1945, Germany had been almost paralyzed economically, and by April she was ruined. In Craven and Cate"s view, "Of all the accomplishments of the air forces, the attainment of air supremacy was the most significant, for it made possible the invasions of the continent and gave the heavy bombers their opportunity to wreck the industries of the Reich." And of all the mult.i.tudes of payoffs from winning air supremacy, the most significant was the strategic bombing campaign against oil refineries. This "deprived the German Air Force of aviation gasoline so that operations were possible only on rare occasions.
German bombers practically disappeared from the air, and whenever fighters tried to interfere with Allied air fleets they invariably got the worst of the battle."12 In April 1944, Germany had adequate supplies of oil. Over the next year, the Eighth Air Force dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on the refineries, the Fifteenth Air Force some 60,000 tons. By April 1945, Germany"s oil production was 5 percent that of the previous year. Toward the end, even the most senior n.a.z.is in the hierarchy were unable to find gasoline for their limousines. German industries were badly crippled or gone. This despite an enormous amount of effort put into defending and rebuilding oil installations. The second major effect of the strategic bombing campaign, in this case aided by the tactical air force, was transportation. The Allied planes attacked bridges, highways, trucks, tanks, or anything that moved, but most of all the bombers went after railroad marshaling yards. By the spring of 1945 the German transport system was so badly wrecked that only the highest-priority military movements could be started with any prospect of getting to their destination. In Craven and Cate"s words, "The bombings of rail centers leading to the Russian front, attacks on marshalling yards in all parts of Germany, the Fifteenth Air Force missions against southern European railways piled up calamity for the Germans. If they produced they could not haul. Their dispersal programs strangled, and the country became helpless."13 The price of the transportation victory had been huge. The Eighth Air Force had dropped one third of its bombs, 235,312 tons, on marshaling yards. The Fifteenth Air Force put almost one half its total bombs, 149,476 tons, on them.
Along with their acknowledgment of the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign, the German leaders being interrogated had criticisms. For example, they thought the Army Air Forces" conviction was wrong that there had to be one critical German industry that, if destroyed, would bring the country to ruin. The great raids on Schweinfurt, for example, designed to deprive German vehicles of ball bearings and thus bring their army to a standstill, caused some destruction and problems, but they were carried out at great risk and high cost and still hardly slowed Germany down. The Germans were able to use ball bearings already in the plants, or on their way there. They dispersed the industry. In the end, the German leaders declared, German armaments production suffered no serious effects from a shortage of ball bearings. Goring and Speer believed that going after electric power stations, which were highly vulnerable to air attack, would have benefited the Allies more. Or the Allies could have weakened Germany, perhaps brought her to surrender, by going after powder and explosive plants - in fact, the Germans said 105 they would have rated such plants second only to oil. Another possibility, generally ignored, was the chemical plants that produced nitrogen and methanol. But whatever their criticisms, and there were many more, the German leaders knew that the tremendous requirements of air raid defense had absorbed much German manpower, scientific energies, and guns and ammunition - an effort that, if applied to the ground forces, might have been decisive for them. We will never know because it was not done that way. We do know that what the Allies did won the war. What McGovern did, what the 741st Squadron did, along with the rest of the 455th Bomb Group and all the Fifteenth Air Force, and the Eighth Air Force, most especially in their attacks against oil refineries and marshaling yards, was critical to the victory.
McGovern, his crew, and all the airmen had spent the war years not in vain but in doing good work.
Along with all the peoples of the Allied nations, they saved Western civilization. Bernard Baruch quoted Clemenceau, who wrote, "They were kittens in play but tigers in battle."
EPILOGUE.
IN JANUARY 2000,my son Hugh and I spent two weeks in Rome, with a two-day trip to Cerignola, interviewing George McGovern, who was then the U.S. amba.s.sador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Six hours a day, sometimes seven, occasionally eight, and on the drive to Cerignola and back to Rome, constantly. Hugh and I have worked together on many books. We have done many interviews, alone or together. Earlier in my life I spent hours, days, weeks interviewing Dwight Eisenhower about the war and his presidency. That was different from interviewing McGovern, and obviously hearing Eisenhower"s accounts of his activities was memorable, a highlight of my life. So too my interviews with thousands of veterans of World War II. But for me and Hugh, listening to McGovern"s account of his youth, his training, and his missions in Italy was especially noteworthy.
What follows is my account of our last interview, filled in with other interview information. The subject was: What happened after your last mission and the end of the war?
Promotions were frozen, which McGovern thought cost him a certain captain"s promotion. Everyone was just waiting for orders to return to the States. For those who had completed their required thirty-five missions, like McGovern, that would mean discharge. For those who had thirty missions, like the men of McGovern"s crew, the victory in Europe meant they would be going off to the Pacific to engage in the war against j.a.pan.
Except Tex Ashlock, who was in the hospital. McGovern had promised him that he would pay a visit, and one day he "borrowed" an Army truck and drove into Cerignola to visit him. When McGovern came into the ward, Ashlock began to cry. Soon he was sobbing. "Here he was, this great big guy, just sobbing like a child," McGovern recalled. McGovern said, "Well, Tex, you"re going to be okay. They"ve got good doctors here and we will see you back in the States."
"If I get back," Ashlock replied.
"You"re going to get back," McGovern said. "I wouldn"t leave here if I thought there was any doubt at all about you coming home. You"ll be back there soon." The other crew members also visited Ashlock, 106 who did get back. Almost immediately when the war ended, the AAF started to close down the air base in Cerignola and those across southern Italy. What to do with the food supplies was a problem. The mess sergeant in Cerignola had hundreds of boxes of powdered eggs, powdered milk, potatoes that could be reconst.i.tuted, thousands of cans of Spam and cheese, orange marmalade, raisins, peanut b.u.t.ter, flour, cornmeal. Tons of food, and that was true of every airfield. The AAF wasn"t going to let the men they had spent so much time, money, and effort training go hungry.
The high command decided, in McGovern"s words, that "there are hungry people all over Europe and we don"t need this stuff back in the States. There"s no market for powdered eggs in Brooklyn. So we"ll give it away, to the Europeans." McGovern was asked if he would partic.i.p.ate. He said yes. "So that"s what we did. We started flying a few days after the end of the war, taking this food up there." They flew from Cerignola to a field about forty miles north of Trieste. McGovern"s crew loaded theDakota Queen with wooden and cardboard boxes of rations and on landing would hand the food out of the bomb bay to GIs, who would put it into trucks and drive it to villages, towns, cities. Soon the AAF began trucking unneeded rations from other bases to Cerignola for the airlift. "We gave away everything we had,"
McGovern said. To the people of Europe, including the surrendered troops: "It didn"t make any difference whether they were German troops."
"This was the first Berlin airlift," I said. "In a way the beginning of the Marshall Plan.""On a small scale, yes," McGovern replied. He was glad to be doing it and took satisfaction in showing that the B-24s "could so something other than bomb people. All those people that we were feeding, we"d hit with bombs. Now we"re giving them food. There was real pride on the part of the crew." Besides, he added, it gave the men something to do while waiting for orders.1 After the wartime missions, flying was a bit dull. McGovern lightened it up a bit. C. W. Cooper related one incident. "We were over Yugoslavia when we saw a B-17 below. McGovern says, "Hey, let"s have some fun." He put the plane in a steep dive and, just before we went sailing past the "17, he cut the number four engine (the one closest to the "17) as if to say, "We"re that much faster on three engines than you in that flying glider are on four.""2 On the second or third flight to Trieste, McGovern had an unexpected encounter. After completing his landing, he did a U-turn and came back to the unloading area, where he pulled up, parked, and cut his engine. As theDakota Queen was unloading, another B-24 came in. "He went to pull around me. I thought he was doing it kind of fast, a little too much of a hot rod technique. And I"ll be d.a.m.ned if he didn"t hit the leading edge of my wing with his wing. He just turned too sharp."
The pilot leaned out his window. He looked at McGovern, sitting in the pilot"s seat, and said, "G.o.d, I"m awfully sorry about that. I hope I haven"t damaged your wing."
"No, I don"t think so," McGovern replied. Then he looked at the pilot again and exclaimed, "Jim Peterson, from Mitch.e.l.l, South Dakota!" McGovern had gone to high school in Mitch.e.l.l with him, but did not know that Peterson was in the AAF. They chatted, reminisced, renewed their acquaintanceship.
Peterson went on to become an architect and lived in Mitch.e.l.l. On every trip back to South Dakota, McGovern would get together with him.3 When he was not flying, McGovern thought about the future.
On May 30 he wrote his friend Bob Pennington (who had gotten engaged via the mails to Eleanor"s twin sister, Ila; they later married), who had told McGovern that he was intent on getting his Ph.D. when he returned to the States. McGovern said he too would go after a Ph.D. "As soon as possible if finances will permit it. I"m quite sure I can swing it. For a while I was pretty shaky about my interest in teaching. The lack of material reward just about had me in the dark for quite a while last winter. That coupled with my seeming intellectual decline had me guessing." Bill Rounds"s father had offered him "a very attractive job with his company," and that was tempting. "Now though I"ve discovered that old driving interest to learn rather than make money is still there. I"m afraid I"m "doomed" to the life of a student and teacher. But as you say it has a mult.i.tude of advantages to offset its more tangible disadvantages."4 From May until mid-June, McGovern continued to fly to Trieste to deliver food, or, sometimes, he would fly over 107 Vienna, Munich, and other former targets, with the ground crew members as pa.s.sengers. The AAF wanted the mechanics to see what the planes they had worked on had done to the Germans. Ken Higgins went along, to operate the radio, but he never liked it. "I just didn"t want to be in that darned old airplane," he explained, fearing an accident might happen.5 Cooper wanted no more, either. Like everyone else, he wanted to go home. On May 12, he wrote his fiancee that "Mac left for Naples yesterday. He"ll be sweating out a boat there for several weeks probably." He thought he would be stuck in Italy for some time. "There"s nothing but rumors yet but when they decide to move us it will be sudden and homeward bound." Two weeks later, he wrote again: "Who should be here to greet me when I got back yesterday but Mac, our pilot! I thought he caught a fast liner in Naples and was in the States but they sent him back so I guess his 35 missions don"t mean any more than my 32."6 Pilot Ed Soderstrom related what happened. Four pilots of the 741st, Charles Painter, McGovern, Howard Surbeck, and Soderstrom, had finished their tours and headed for Naples to catch a boat home. But when they tried to board the troopship, their names were not on the orders.
Instead they had orders to return to the squadron, where they were told they were to fly their airplanes back to the States, and meanwhile they would continue to fly food to Trieste.7 On June 16, Cooper wrote, "As Mac and I were starting home from the club last night, we had a surprise. We met a man in black slacks and a black shirt. He was half Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma and was just wandering around seeing the world. How he ever got here we don"t know." He was, possibly, one of the "code-talkers," Indians who served as radiomen with the ground troops - the Army figured, rightly, that there was no need to use coded messages when the Indians could speak to each other in their own language and the Germans would never understand them.
The following day, Cooper wrote his fiancee that while McGovern and Rounds were going to fly a B-24 back to the States the next day, he didn"t expect to be on the plane. "It makes me sad to see my old skipper, Mac, leaving and me not going with him. I hate to trust him with any other navigator and he doesn"t particularly relish a long hop without me along, so it"s mutual."8 Bill Rounds had flown several of the supply missions to Trieste. In his diary on May 20, he wrote, "I flew cargo in a B-24. I buzzed Venice. It was beautiful." He did other things, such as collecting a h.o.a.rd of German Luger pistols. Once he talked a friend, who was a fighter pilot, into taking him to Florence in his P-47. Somehow he squeezed into the c.o.c.kpit, riding piggy-back. In Florence, the two men got drunk, went to the opera, got seats in a box, and found the music to be dull. So they began to blow up condoms, tie them at the end, and throw them down on the audience. They laughed uproariously at the sight of those "balloons" coming down.9 McGovern, Surbeck, Soderstrom, and Painter were first on the list of pilots to fly home. On June 17, they decided that before doing so they would fly one last "mission." They took off in their planes, formed up, and buzzed the squadron area. Painter flew the lead ship, McGovern was in the number two spot, Surbeck was number three, and Soderstrom number four. They came in so close to the ground that they just missed a power line running along the road, then buzzed the headquarters of the 456th Bomb Group. They were so low their prop wash ripped the flag off the headquarters building. The 456th commanding officer was furious. He decided that Painter, McGovern, Surbeck, and Soderstrom would be the last, not the first, to leave Italy, but by the time the orders were cut it was too late.10 On June 18, McGovern took off for North Africa. Cooper, it turned out, was the navigator. Indeed all the crew, except Ashlock, were on the plane, along with a half-dozen sergeants, AAF meteorologists going to the States from Europe, then on to the Pacific. These men tossed in their duffel bags, arranging them as well as they could, and sat or lay down. They had some sandwiches and soft drinks aboard. The crew and pa.s.sengers began laughing. They were leaving Italy. The war in Europe war over.
McGovern took off. They would be flying alone. First stop, Marrakesh, North Africa. "I hadn"t had any flying like that during the war," McGovern said. "I was always used to having formations around, and scores of airplanes dotting the sky, and somebody shooting at us." This time no one was shooting, it was quiet, the plane was all alone, all the engines were working without any problems. Coming into 108 Marrakesh, McGovern said to Rounds that perhaps they could pick up some food as well as gasoline.
"George," Rounds replied,"those people haven"t got any food. They"re eating each other." It was a brief stop, fortunately, as in late July it was fearfully hot.
Next stop, the Azores. But about a hundred miles from the islands, Cooper called McGovern on the intercom to say that he was lost. "I think it"s just temporary," he remarked, "and I"ll get a fix." But when they got to where the islands were presumed to be, there was nothing except blue water. McGovern was "just furious." He thought, G.o.d, we"ve gone through thirty-five missions and my navigator can"t find the air base? How can we possibly be this unlucky. We"re going into the drink out here in the Atlantic because Cooper can"t find the Azores. He turned on his radio and, thankfully, raised the tower at the field. He asked what heading he should fly on, based on his present position, to get to the base.
The tower told him to turn to such-and-such a heading. He did and brought the islands into view.
"Here"s this eleven-thousand-foot runway. We hadn"t seen a runway like that since we left the States."
He brought the plane down, got his tanks refilled, and took off for the next stop, Gander, Newfoundland.
McGovern got her aloft, climbed to a few thousand feet, and people began falling asleep. All the meteorologists. Indeed everyone but McGovern, the navigator, and Higgins. "Bill Rounds conked off, just sound asleep. You could hear this heavy breathing all over the plane."
It was a beautiful night, the air clear, a huge round moon making it almost as light as daylight. McGovern put the plane on autopilot, something he never did even once during the war, and he too fell sound asleep. Higgins put his head down on his table and fell asleep. So did Cooper. After some time, McGovern shook himself awake. The moon was beautiful, the stars shining, he was the only one awake.
"I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of peace. Sheer joy. We were going home. I finally realized the war was over, and I"m going to see Eleanor, and my mother, and my little girl, then four or five months old. Everything now is going to be all right." At Gander, as the plane was refueling, McGovern called Eleanor on the telephone. "It was wonderful, to hear that voice again." He didn"t want to exceed three minutes on the long-distance call - too expensive - so he merely said he would be back in Mitch.e.l.l in two or three days.
"Well, I want to meet you," Eleanor replied. "I want us just to be the two of us when you first come in."
He said he expected to be discharged at Fort Snelling, near Minneapolis. She said she would meet him there.
Off again, this time to Camp Miles Standish outside Boston. "I regret to say that was the last landing of the war for me and one of the worst landings I ever made. I couldn"t believe it. I leveled off and that B-24 dropped about six feet. Justbang, we hit the ground. I got on the intercom and I said, "Well fellas, we"ve justhit the United States."" No one minded the b.u.mp. There were cheers, laughter, tears.
Within two days, McGovern was at Fort Snelling. Eleanor met him. They spent the first night in a hotel in Minneapolis. Then off by train to Mitch.e.l.l, where he immediately enrolled for the fall semester.
We asked if he had brought any souvenirs home from his year in Italy. He replied that he had with him that piece of flak that had been only inches away from taking his head off, but has since misplaced or lost it. He had his uniform - which he had paid for out of his own pocket - but he gave his flight jacket to the Air Force museum in Pueblo, Colorado. He did keep his wings, dog tags, and the bracelet with his name and serial number.
As were nearly all the veterans of the war, McGovern was a good, hardworking student, eager to make up for lost time, earn his under-graduate degree and get off to graduate school to pursue his Ph.D. in 109 history. But one night, needing a break from his studies, he took Eleanor to a movie at the Paramount Theater in Mitch.e.l.l. On the newsreel, the announcer was saying, "American bombers that were flying a few short weeks or months ago in England and Italy and the Pacific are now being collected in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and other Western states to be salvaged."
The newsreel showed bulldozers coming along and shoving hundreds of B-24s into a heap. One of them had a name on it,Yo-Yo. The cameraman zoomed in on it so people could see the name.
"G.o.d, I just couldn"t believe it." He had flown that plane, although he and his crew called it theDakota Queen. But it wasYo-Yo he had flown. "I felt like just getting right up out of my seat. We nursed those bombers back as carefully as we could, and conserved the gas, and protected the oil, and watched the oil pressure and the other gauges, and tried to land them as well as we could, and we brought back the precious airplane. Now it was being turned into junk. I couldn"t believe it. I reacted almost violently. I wanted to get up and tell the audience what we had just seen was sheer waste and extravagance. Made no sense at all. It really stirred my Scotch-Irish soul to see it taking place." Within less than a year after the war, virtually all the B-24s had been salvaged. Fifty-five years after the war, there are three B-24s in museums, only one still flying. And except for those who flew them, or serviced them, they are today virtually forgotten.
At the end of our last interview, McGovern said that for more than half a century he had not thought much about his war experiences. As a politician, especially in 1972, running for president, he had done interviews with reporters on the subject, but usually for five minutes or so and never for more than a half-hour or in any depth. He said our two-week-long interview "has forced me to dig deeply into my memory and my psyche." And what he especially recalled was Eleanor"s life with him, what traveling to all those airfields during his training had meant to her and to him, "and what it was like having that baby when I"m 3,000 miles away and not even knowing whether Eleanor would ever see me again."
He paused, then said, "It"s made me realize how much I love that woman. I have known for years I was in love with her, but being asked to probe into my life during the war has really brought that home to me in a different way. Shared history is a big part of being in love."
We asked McGovern to sum up his war experience. With his answer, he spoke for every airman, every GI, every sail