Armageddon - Max Hastings [234]
They joined the 448th Bomb Group at Seething, a remote Norfolk airfield, in September 1944. They slept two crews to a Nissen hut, and found themselves moving into the beds of men who had gone down the previous day. Their surviving roommates had done fifteen trips. The newcomers quizzed them about what it was like, and were told: “pretty scary.” Wartime bomber crews were mere passing visitors on their bases for the few months of their tour, amid a huge permanent population of ground staff and maintenance personnel. The only exception at Seething was George, a cook who had been there since the base was built, and suddenly volunteered to reclassify as an air gunner. George had made himself so cosy that he spent most of his off-duty time in the cottage of villagers who lived at the end of the runway, whose daughter Daphne was “just a little bit pregnant” by him.
Wells’s and Dorfman’s crew made their first trip on 13 September, a milk-run to a marshalling yard. Their second trip was more hazardous. They flew at 200 feet over Arnhem, pushing out supplies to the beleaguered British paratroops, glimpsing the Dutch waving and the German tracer slashing up at them. “We dropped our supplies in the right place,” said Harold Dorfman, “right on the Germans, of course.” Dorfman was a passionate amateur photographer and snatched some remarkable images from the cockpit during their tour, not least those of Liberators disintegrating in mid-air. “I stood at the window and cried as I photographed our wingman breaking up,” said Dorfman. His own crew was lucky. They trusted each other—“Sometimes I think we were too young to be as scared as we should have been,” said Corporal Wells. He himself felt no great animosity towards the Germans they were bombing. “We knew Germany was the ally of Japan. That was enough. In those days, people were just patriotic. It never occurred to us to ask ourselves whether what we were doing was right.” But Harold Dorfman said: “I’m a Jew. I knew what was going on. I had no sympathy whatsoever for the Germans.” Likewise the RAF’s Bill Winter, who said: “We never thought about what was underneath—if you saw a lot of fires you just thought: ‘We’ve really given them a pasting tonight.’ ”
Sergeant Jack Brennan, a B-17 radio-operator/gunner in 200th Group, belonged to an unhappy crew. They neither liked nor trusted their pilot, “a phoney . . . There was a real personality problem. We got hit just about every trip. Mostly, we survived thanks to the skill of our navigator. None of us was in the mould of heroes.” Brennan was a twenty-two-year-old baker’s son from Staten Island, and his family were furious when he volunteered in 1942. They had been confident of getting him a deferral. As his pilot blundered through the skies over Germany, hardly a day passed when Brennan did not regret his eagerness to join the Air Corps. His only consolation was that he felt very conscious of how much better they lived on their base at Royston in Hertfordshire than did GIs on the ground in Germany.
On their twenty-fourth mission, they were hit amidships by flak over Berlin. To the disgust of some of the crew, the pilot set course for neutral Sweden, a destination favoured by Allied airmen who had seen enough of the war. “We’d always known that if something happened, the pilot wouldn’t be there—and he wasn’t.” Seven members of the crew jumped over Sweden. Only Brennan, the navigator and bombardier survived. A U.S. legation representative, who came from Stockholm to visit Brennan in the Swedish hospital where he was recovering from arm and leg injuries, said anxiously: “Don’t say anything detrimental about your pilot.” The gunner observed wearily: