There were fifteen or twenty people on a crude runway, their arms waving in a greeting.
Then Dolan stood the B-25 on its wing and began a one-hundred-eighty degree turn. As the plane leveled off, there came the sound of hydraulics as the flaps and gear came down, and the engines changed pitch.
Darmstadter got his seat belt in place just as the plane touched down.
There was a far louder than he expected rumble from the landing carriage, followed immediately by the change of pitch as the engine throttles were retarded.
And then the plane lurched as if something had grabbed it.
Instantly, Darmstadter’s view through the Plexiglas disappeared in a gross distortion, and then almost as quickly the distortion seemed to be wiped away.
He realized that what had happened was that water, a great deal of water, had splashed against the window.
The plane was now braking hard. Darmstadter felt himself being pressed against the upholstery of the rear-facing chair.
And then it stopped for a moment, and then turned around. As Darmstadter unfastened his lap belt, the engines died. The silence, broken only by the faint pings and moans of cooling metal, was surprising.
“Vis International Aerodrome,” Canidy called cheerfully from the cockpit.
“Connections to Budapest, Voodapest, Zoodapest, and all points east. Thank you for flying Balkan Airlines.”
Chuckling, Darmstadter got to the access hatch in the floor behind the cockpit just after Canidy had dropped through it to the ground. Darmstadter jumped after him.
[FOUR]
When It. Colonel Peter Douglass’ Jr returned to his quarters from the postmission debriefing, the Underwood typewriter and the service record were waiting for him on the old and battered desk in his room.
It was SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. There was a system. There had to be a system. The SOP It. Colonel Douglass had set up was that in the case of pilots within a section, their section leaders wrote the letters, subject to review by squadron commanders. In the case of section leaders, squadron commanders wrote the letters, subject to review by the group exec. In the case of squadron commanders, or squadron executive officers, the group commander wrote the letters himself.
Douglass kicked off his sheepskin flying boots, sending them sailing across the small room in the curved-ceilinged Quonset hut. He took off his battered, leather-brimmed hat and skimmed it three feet toward a hook on the wall. It touched the hook, but bounced off and fell to the floor. He made no move to pick it up.
He reached into the pocket of the sheepskin flying jacket and came out with two miniature bottles of Old Overholt rye whiskey. Eighth Air Force SOP provided for the “postmission issue of no more than two bottles, 1.6 ounces, bourbon or rye whiskey 86 proof or 100 proof to flight crew personnel, when, in the opinion of the attending flight surgeon, such issue is medically indicated.”
The Eighth Air Force SOP went on to stipulate that “in no case is the issue of more than two bottles permitted” and that “wherever possible, the issue of medicinal whiskey will be made only after flight crews have undergone postmission debriefing.”
And finally, the Eighth Air Force SOP stated that “medicinal whiskey so issued will be ingested in the presence of the prescribing flight surgeon.”
Translated, that meant that unless you watched those crazy pilots, or, in the case of bombers, navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, and aerial gunners, they were liable to hoard their “bottles, 1.6 ounces” of medicinal whiskey until they had enough to tie a load on, or worse, share it with people not entitled to medicinal whiskey.
It. Colonel Douglass walked to the battered desk, pulled the drawer open, and carefully laid his miniature bottles in it. There were already a dozen other bottles there. It was the 344the Fighter Group commander’s unofficial SOP to pass out his ration of medicinal booze to his pilots when he thought such issue
was indicated for morale purposes. Sometimes he passed it out to the enlisted men, too, in contravention of the spirit and letter of the Eighth Air Force SOE It bothered the hell out of the ground crews when their plane and pilot didn’t come home. And some took it worse than others.