They’d flown out of the storm; the sky was merely overcast. Men turned in their seats to peer out the small windows. As the light strengthened, Macurdy could see brown hills ahead. The others saw them too; what they couldn’t see were the other thirty-eight planes. Four others, yes, but not thirty-eight. Had they gotten lost in the storm? The talk picked up. Oran was supposed to be up ahead somewhere. Had the pilot gotten the signal from the beacon ship? Where was the invasion fleet? Dead ahead maybe, someone suggested, where only the pilot could see it.
Lieutenant Warner was the senior trooper on board, and etting to his feet, he went to the cockpit. A few minutes later e came back out. “At ease!” he shouted, and the talking stopped. “The pilot doesn’t know exactly where we are, or where the other thirty-four planes are. The storm winds blew from the east, which means we blew off course to the west. When we get closer to shore, he and this group are going to fly east for a while, till they see some landmark they recognize from the map.”
There were groans and a few oaths. “What about the beacon ship?” someone asked.
“They haven’t heard a peep from it. They’ll know Oran for sure though, when they see it.” Then he moved on to his seat. The Pratt & Whitney engines continued their reassuring roar, smooth and constant, as if they could go on forever.
With land close ahead, the five planes veered eastward, continuing on a line of flight that allowed the troopers to make out Arab villages on the shore. Half an hour later, the Lieutenant disappeared into the cockpit again, and this time stayed a while. while. Finale stuck his head out, grinning.
“They know where they are now. They’re going inland, and et to La Senia from the west.” This didn’t bring actual cheers, ut Macurdy felt the tension ease. The airfield at La Senia was their primary target. Engines droning steadily, they flew inland over barren rugged hills.
Soon he could see a large flat area with a whitish look, that he thought might be a salt flat, a dry desert lake. He’d never seen one before, but it fitted the description. Warner came out of the cockpit again. “They’ve spotted more 47s ahead,” he said, “sitting on the ground with guys around them, and our gas gauge reads empty. We’re going to land.”
There were no cheers, and not much was said, except the wry comment that, if that was La Senia Airfield below, or any other goddamned airfield, they’d sure as hell camouflaged the hangars well.
Other groups of C47s arrived after they did. The lakebed, which their pilot said was 35 miles long and 7 wide, consisted of a salty crust beneath which was the stickiest mud Macurdy had ever experienced. Walk fifty feet, and each boot had ten pounds of it stuck on like glue. None of the pilots had heard a sound from the beacon ship, or picked up the radar beacon that was supposed to mark the drop zone.
Some of the planes that had crossed the coast near Oran had been fired on from the ground; the French had decided to fight after all. When Colonel Raff arrived with six planeloads of troopers, and spotted the planes on the lakebed, the nonjumping Air Corps officer in overall command of the operation radioed him that they were taking sniper fire, and were threatened by enemy armor. So Raff and the six planeloads jumped to attack the armor with small arms, grenades, and anti-tank mines. (Bazookas were still unknown.) The colonel hit a large rock when he landed, broke a couple of ribs and was spitting blood. The sniping, it turned out, was at such long range, it had failed to hit anyone, while the “enemy armor” turned out to be an American armored reconnaissance patrol that had gotten through the French defenses earlier that morning.
Before long, most of the 39-plane armada was there in the mud, with too little gas to fly anywhere, and the nearest target was not La Senia, but the military airfield at Tafaraoui, 38 miles away, much of that distance on the lakebed. Part of the battalion was left with the stranded planes. The rest started hiking through the gumbo toward Tafaraoui. Macurdy had thought that any exertion they’d experience in the field couldn’t be worse than they’d survived in training. Now, trudging through the gumbo, he changed his mind. A trooper name Hennessy, a Wyoming cowboy, called it “goddamn ‘dobe clay, the worst fucking shit in the world,” and no one argued with him.