Flak Happy

Introduction

One of the most skillful B-17 pilots I ever flew with collapsed on the field one day at Bassingbourn, home of the 91st Bombardment Group. Combat Fatigue, they called it, and they sent him back to the United States, his combat career finished, to instruct fledgling pilots who, in the turn, would go off to fly combat missions.

One war earlier, in 1918, his condition might have come under the shell shock umbrella. Today, in 2011, young men who return from Afghanistan or Iraq with shattered nerves are diagnosed with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.

We who flew repeatedly through flak—exploding anti-aircraft shells—called it flak happy. Most of us who flew more than a very few missions over Adolph Hitler’s Festung Europa were probably flak happy in greater or lesser degree.

We’d see a young man –most of us were between 20 and 25—gazing unblinking off into space, a grim look or a blank look on his face, and we recognized it as a symptom.

Some had recurring nightmares. When we returned from a mission and went to debriefing—our report, as an entire crew, of the mission—we were served two ounces (sometimes a very generous two ounces) of whiskey in a water glass,. Some of us swallowed our two ounces in a gulp or two and reached for the glass of a crewman who didn’t drink.

Some drank enough in the officers’ club every night to help them go to sleep. A fine pilot I flew with would burn half his cigarette on the first drag, some observers said, taking in as much smoke as his lungs would hold, then retaining it for as long as he could before exhaling.

Some men, judged unfit for further combat, were relieved of flying duty and sent back to a United States base. Sometimes a week’s R & R, rest and rehabilitation, in a peaceful, comfortable locale remote from the cluster of air bases in East Anglia, would restore a nerve-wracked flyer to flying condition.

But these overt symptoms aside, most of us laughed and joked, as young men will, and went on flying, doing our assigned jobs competently—sometimes superbly.

These pages detail the author’s flirtation with flak-happiness as he navigated several different B-17s through sixteen and a half missions—shot down on the 17th.

I

Late in June, 1944, Crew 4090 from Sioux City Army Air Base was awaiting takeoff instructions from the Grenier Field (New Hampshire) tower. Training was finished, and the reality of the air war over Europe lay ahead of us.

We had languished around Grenier Field, not at all unpleasantly, for nearly a week, and the time had come. Our bags were packed with our personal necessities and other items we found important enough to fly to Europe.

Mine included a few bottles of fine spirits that my copilot, Garry Davis, had asked me to take for him. He had laid in such a big stock of good potables that it wouldn’t all fit safely into his bags. It included what was for years my favorite Scotch whiskey—Haig and Haig’s Pinch Bottle; two or three fifths of Old Taylor bourbon, some Pedro Domecq brandy, and other delicacies. Garry had heard that some of these things were in short supply in England.

We lined up for takeoff in Army B-17 #7655. We were flying more heavily loaded than we used to be in training; so when our turn came to take to the skies, Bruce (Bruce Benton, the pilot), held the plane’s nose to the runway until our air speed approached 140 knots. Then the big ship lifted effortlessly into the sky, and we were bound for Goose Bay in Labrador, about five hours away.

Although, as navigator, I recorded the indicated air speed every five minutes in my navigator’s log, I don’t remember now what it was. Weeks later, when we were flying combat missions, we usually flew at 155 knots. We were probably doing that, or maybe a little more, on the way to Goose Bay.

It was an easy, uneventful trip, but for me, a geography enthusiast, exciting. I enjoyed the dark forests of Maine, where American soldiers had struggled toward Quebec at the start of the Revolutionary War. I found it all exhilarating—flying across the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, seeing the forests change to shorter spruce as we flew further north, and marveling at the myriads of lakes.

We landed late in the day at Goose Bay Army Air Base, a stepping stone used by thousands of American airplanes on their way to Europe. The base was essentially flat and featureless except for the low-growing spruce forest that surrounded the field. The United States acquired the right to build an air base there as part of the lend-lease agreement between the U.S. and Great Britain early in World War II. Construction started in 1941, and by the end of the year, three 7000-foot runways had been built. The first Army Air Force plane landed at Goose in December, 1941

There was no nearby town with bright lights for us to visit, so we retired early that night, thinking about the long flight over the Atlantic Ocean that awaited us on the morrow.

We were up early and briefed for our nine-hour flight to Keflavik Army Air Base in Iceland. My navigation chart and working instruments lay before me on the little navigator’s table in the nose of the B-17. I worked out a compass heading that would take us in the right direction. This meant adjusting the compass heading to produce the desired true heading. Variation had to be accounted for, along with a minor correction for declination. Variation was the difference between true north and magnetic north as indicated on the compass. Declination was a minor correction for the light tug on the compass that the plane’s own magnetic field made. I felt just a suggestion of butterflies in my stomach when we could no longer see land in any direction, and I’m sure some of the other crew members did too, though no one said anything.

Two or three hours out over the Atlantic, our ball turret gunner, Jerry Ransdell, crawled up beside me and said, Hey, navigator, where are we? Jerry was a funny guy, and with time he became my best friend on the crew.

I drew a large circle encompassing perhaps 1000 square miles south of Greenland on my chart and said, Well, we’re somewhere in here, I think. Jerry grabbed my intercom microphone and called, Hey, guys, let’s throw the navigator out right here! I laughed and showed him where we were.

With no land features to focus on, I had to read our drift on the white caps of the ocean below. In training we had been told about this, but even so, I was a little apprehensive about the accuracy of the process. Reading drift was a matter of sighting through a drift meter on objects below to determine how far off the compass heading winds were blowing the airplane. It was important to check on wind direction regularly because wind forecasts were much less reliable in 1944 than they are today—and even today they need to be checked regularly.

Another step in getting us safely to Iceland was to check on our actual speed over the earth’s surface. Essentially, this was another check on the wind and also a check on the airspeed indicators in the airplane. If a headwind was slowing the plane more than expected, we needed to know it; or if a tailwind was increasing our speed, that would be useful information.

The only way the navigator could check on speed over a seemingly boundless ocean was to shoot sun lines at noon—that is, use the octant to take three quick readings on the sun’s position and then calculate our speed from those readings. The time of the readings had to be exact, and the sightings on the sun had to be accurate for the resulting speed calculation to be of any value. My calculation of our speed based on those sun lines was going to be worrisome later on.

We flew on and on, with nothing to see but the cold North Atlantic. There was a bit of light-hearted banter between crew members, but mostly it was quiet except for the heavy drone of the four big Wright-Cyclone engines.

A little over eight hours from Goose Bay, I began to feel a bit anxious. I had checked and rechecked all my navigational calculations, and everything seemed OK. But my ETA (estimated time of arrival) would be up within the hour, and getting safely to Iceland after nine hours over the ocean was my responsibility.

A half hour before ETA. Still nothing but water. A half-hour away from Keflavik, we should have been seeing land before long. My ETA passed, and still no Iceland. I told Bruce, the pilot, to continue on the course we had been following. I was sure it was correct. Or was it?

Finally, a half-hour past my ETA, we could see Iceland, and a few minutes after 4 p.m. we landed at the Keflavik base.

I was deeply chagrined over the blown ETA, and I spoke to Bruce about it. He laughed. Oh, he said, I wasn’t worried. I picked up the Keflavik radio an hour before we landed. You were right on course.

That helped, but there was still the matter of the sadly erroneous ETA. I’d learn more about it the next day.

The geography of Iceland, what I could see of it, was fascinating. I set out on what was intended to be a long exploratory walk across the open fields adjacent to the airport. It turned out not to be such a long walk. The fields were strewn with boulders and/or chunks of lava, and walking was slow and laborious. In the distance I could see low hills. There were no high elevations on the westward pointing peninsula where Keflavik was located, nor were there any visible from it.

I was thrilled to be practically at the Arctic Circle. Iceland lies just south of that magic latitude, and in late June, when we arrived, it was daylight almost all night. I stayed up past midnight so I could see it to my own satisfaction.

II

The next day, when we landed for an overnight stop in Ireland, I learned what had gone wrong with my ETA. At the base in Ireland, all of our equipment was checked and, if necessary, replaced before we moved on to England and our combat assignments.

I learned there that my watch was seriously defective—enough to throw off the sun line calculations I had made six hours after leaving Goose Bay. I was a relieved and happy navigator!

It has been a lingering disappointment that I didn’t get to see any of the Emerald Isle except the base and what we could see as we approached the base. My great-great-great-great grandfather, Scotch-Irish, had come from Ireland to Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s.

Another disappointment—we had to surrender our brand new B-17 and take a short boat ride across the Irish Sea to England. I don’t know which bomb group wound up in possession of our plane, but it wasn’t our group.

Perhaps to keep us from feeling too cocky and self-important, we had to line up in formation (shades of Cadets all over again) and march to the boat that was to take us to England. And an Army non-com was put in charge of us for the embarkation. That doesn’t sound so bad now, but at the time we were a pretty disgruntled lot. I guess we thought that, being officers and gentlemen, we could just straggle down to the boat—no telling how long the boat might have had to wait for the last to straggle in.

Our boat docked at Blackpool, not far from Liverpool, and a train hauled us across the middle of England to a base near King’s Lynn. We spent two or three weeks there without much serious work to do. We had meetings and lectures to attend nearly every day, but we also had plenty of time to walk off the base and meet some of the English people for the first time. England was not exactly a culture shock for us, but there were differences for us to become aware of.

The money system was at first baffling and amusing to us, but it didn’t take us long to get used to pounds and crowns and shillings and pence

I was not very long past the little girls are made of sugar and spice stage, and the sometimes frank and earthy language of young English girls was a bit of a shock to me.

The first letter I wrote home after reaching England was on a V—Mail form. V (for