W E B Griffin – Men at War 4 – The Fighting Agents

Only three Gooney Bird pilots had volunteered. The other two were pilots who desperately wanted to be fighter pilots, and believed that unless they did something, anything, to get out of Gooney Birds, they would spend the war in a Gooney Bird cockpit.

Hank Darmstadter, who himself would have loved to be a fighter pilot, didn’t think there was any chance at all of getting to be one by volunteering for this “classified mission.” He could think of no good, logical reason for his having volunteered. Without false heroics, he understood that there was hazard enough in either towing gliders or dropping parachutists when there were a hundred Gooney Birds all doing the same thing at the same time in a very small chunk of airspace.

The one reason he had volunteered was that he had wanted to, and he was perfectly willing to admit that it was probably a goddamned dumb thing to do.

When he saw the adjutant, there was a short questionnaire to fill out. It asked the routine questions, and a couple of strange ones. One question was to rate his own ability as a pilot, with five choices from “completely competent” down through “marginally competent.” Darmstadter had judged himself in the middle: “reasonably competent, considering experience and training.”

Another question wanted to know if he spoke a foreign language, and if so,

which one and how well. And the last question was whether or not he had any relatives, however remote the connection, living on the European continent, and if so, their names and addresses.

He was tempted to answer “no” to both questions, but in the end, he put down that he understood German, and that he had a great-uncle, Karl Heinz Darmstadter, and presumably some other relatives, in Germany but that he didn’t know where.

He hadn’t quite forgotten about having volunteered, but he had put it out of his mind. For one thing, he felt pretty sure if they were making a selection of volunteers, they would probably have a dozen better qualified people than a Gooney Bird driver to pick, and for another, considering the Army Air Corps bureaucracy, it would take three weeks or a month before they told him “thanks, but no thanks.”

At four o’clock this morning, the charge of quarters had come to his Quonset hut, and told him the adjutant wanted to see him. The adjutant had handed him a teletype message:

PRIORITY

HQ EIGHTH US AIRFORCE

COMMANDING OFFICER 312TH TROOP CARRIER WING

1ST LT HENRY G. DABMSTADTER 03434090 2101 TROOP CARRIER

SQUADRON TRANSFERRED AMD WILL IMMEDIATELY PROCEED

FERSPIELD ARMY AIR CORPS STATION REPORTING UPON ARRIVAL

THEREAT TO COMMANDING OFFICER 402ND COMPOSITE SQUADRON FOR

DUTY. OFFICER WILL CARRY ALL SERVICE RECORDS AMD ALL

PERSONAL PROPERTY. CO 312TH TCW DIRECTED TO PROVIDE MOST

EXPEDITIOUS AIR OR GROUND TRANSPORTATION.

BY COMMAND OF LT GENERAL EAKER

A.J. MACHAMEE COLONEL USA AC ADJUTANT GENERAL

At 0400 there was soup thick enough to cut with a knife, and the weather forecast said “snow and/or freezing rain,” so the most expeditious air or ground transportation had been a jeep. It had been a five-hour drive, and Darmstadter had been stiff with cold when they were passed inside the Fersfield gate by an MP wearing his scarf wrapped around his head against the cold.

“The 402nd’s way the hell and gone the other end of the field, Lieutenant.

When you see a B-17 graveyard, you found it,” the MP said.

As they drove down a road paralleling the north-south runway, past lines of B-17s in revetments, Darmstadter was surprised to hear an aircraft ap e of the jeep and looked at the sky. It was neither raining nor snowing, but conditions were far below “what he thought of as minimums of visibility.

And then he saw the airplane. It was a B-25, and for a moment he thought the pilot had overshot the runway and would have to go around. But the pilot set it down anyway.

Damned fool! Darmstadter thought, professionally.

They reached the end of the runway. There was, as the MP had said, a B-17 graveyard: fifteen, maybe twenty, battered and wrecked and skeletal B17s, some missing engines, some with no landing gear, their fuselages sitting on the ground. Three battered B-17s, Darmstadter saw with confused interest, were still flyable, to judge by their positions near the taxi ramp, and by the fire extinguishers and other ground equipment near them. But the tops of their fuselages, except for portions of the pilots’ windshields, were gone, as if someone had simply taken a cutting torch and cut them away. Someone, for reasons Darmstadter could not imagine, had turned three B-17s into open-cockpit aircraft.

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