The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [133]
Joe Jr. had been deputized the squadron secretary, keeper of the diary. He wrote about the mud with the passionate detail that he had never mustered in his articles about the Spanish Civil War. “During the winter months an intermittent drizzle, occasionally whipped into a solid wall of water by the capricious winds, made it almost impossible to stay dry,” he wrote, as if he were preparing a prosecutor’s brief against the weather. “Inadequate heat—miniature coke stoves sparsely scattered around the base—made it almost impossible to get either dry or warm. Plumbing was early stone age and even more widely dispersed than the living sites or aircraft. There was no toilet paper, although rolls of what seemed to be laminated woods were provided plainly stamped with ‘Government Property.’ Ablutions were located near the officers’ mess which, unfortunately, was about a half mile, as the herd grazes, from Site one.”
Mudville Heights was the squadron’s main place of repose after their often debilitating, frigid, twelve-hour flights in search of German submarines. The U-boat men called the Bay of Biscay the “Valley of Death,” and so it had become. As Joe Jr. flew his plane at fifteen hundred feet, scanning the ocean for the telltale sign of a periscope, he knew that this water was a graveyard not only for submarines but for allied planes as well. He traveled alone, without a fighter escort. He could easily have become bored, sweeping the empty ocean hour after hour. But at any moment a pack of Nazi fighters might appear from above, falling upon the slower-moving plane with their deadly sting.
Joe Jr. had hardly begun flying his patrols when Commander Reedy spotted six German JU-88s on the horizon and had to lumber up into cloud cover before the Germans got close enough to fire. The next day Lieutenant W. E. Grumbles broke radio silence to say that he was being attacked. He called again and again, his poignant messages heard by the other planes, and when he called no more the pilots knew the squadron had lost its first plane.
The very next day Joe Jr. was approaching Junkers Junction, the Atlantic waters off the coast of northwestern Spain, his head hunkered down over the radarscope. He spotted a blip and looked up. He knew immediately that it was a German plane a little over seven miles away and closing. This was a moment to curse the cloudless sky and wish for all the fog and drizzle of Mudville Heights. The German fighter drew within eyesight and tried to shepherd Joe Jr. coastward, further away from any help, like a wolf separating a deer from the herd. A second plane joined its comrade, near enough now that Joe Jr. recognized them as Messerschmitt 210s. One fighter moved in for the kill, now no more than six hundred yards astern.
“Commence firing,” Joe Jr. shouted. The gunner whirled his bow turret toward the streaking plane and fired a devastating barrage at the oncoming plane. The ME-210 dove on, homed onto Joe Jr.’s plane, and at the last moment peeled off and retreated up into the sky. The pilot could have downed Joe Jr.’s plane, but his guns must have jammed, for he never fired. On this day the blue sky had conspired against Joe Jr., but he had reason to believe that he was still that child of fortune.
When Joe Jr. got back to the base, he had the next day off. He wrote letters, read, and in the evening headed off to the only diversion within leagues, the Royal Oak, a pub where many of his colleagues attempted to see how many pints they could down before the closing bell sounded. Joe Jr. had a politician