ENC 1101-B3 & B4: Writing for Discovery

The smoke trail from the burning oil could be seen for miles. They were lucky that the German planes decided not to follow them any further, because their B-29 was already bullet laden. As the plane glided down, Captain Williams yelled to the crew, “Brace yourselves this one’s gonna be rough!” When the plane crashed the sound of the metal scraping against the ground was deafening as the crew was flung around the inside of the plane like rag dolls. Covered in a cloud of dust, the crew of the B-29 quickly piled out before the leaking fuel ignited, and their plane exploded in the middle of the Italian pasture.

When all of the crew got out, they realized how lucky they were to escape with only minor cuts and bruises. Disoriented by the crash, the crew was not sure where the air field was. Wiping some of the dirt off of his flight suit, nose gunner Sergeant Jimmy Henry says, “The field is over yonder, just on the other side of them trees.” As they begin the trek back to the field, Jimmy can not help but think, “I sure hope I’m right. That crash really threw me around.”

After what seemed like hours, the crew finally came through the forest and saw the field. Covered in dust and blood from the cuts of the plexiglas, and still a little disoriented from the crash, Jimmy stumbled into his tent. While he tried to get out of his flight suit off he collapsed on his rack. He finally woke up three hours later, still in his flight suit and with one boot still on.

As he walked out of the tent, trying to figure out what happened, he sees Captain Williams.

“Captain, what happened?”

“I think that you hit your head during the crash, you’ve been passed out in your rack for the past three hours.”

“Oh,” says Jimmy, and stumbled back to his tent. When he got to his bed, he pulled out his journal from underneath his mattress and wrote about what he could remember from the day’s mission.

“Hit solid, out board props gone, then #4 engine breaks out (in flames), then the #3 prop, lost left landing gear…lost speed, wing dropped, ground spin, right wing off, landing gear through wing, stopped cloud of dust, inside black, everyone piled out, able to walk, rather run, when you think about 1800 gal of gas, with fire in #4…5 miles from field yet took 2 hours for anyone to get there. 25 tons of metal at 100 mph sho’ does plow up Italian dirt.”

As he finished writing about the day’s events, a picture of his beautiful Charlotte fell out. Reaching down to pick it up, he remembered the day that she had given the picture to him.

It was the day he was shipped off, as he was about to board the ship, Charlotte ran up to him, desperation raging through her eyes.

"Wait!” she cried. “I want you to have this, so every time you look at this, I’ll be right with you, no matter where you are," Charlotte sobbed as the tears ran from her eyes.

As he looked at the picture, he realized that Charlotte had been with him, because with that picture she was right next to him. Placing the picture back in his journal, he thinks, “Only a couple more missions, then I can finally have Charlotte back in my arms.”

Herman Ware then walked in and told Jimmy that the mission assignments were posted in the Officer’s Club. So Jimmy closed his journal and put it back under his mattress. As he walked down to the O-Club, his gut was in a ball. “I hope that I don’t have another mission, this will be my fifth in three days,” mumbles Jimmy.

The lights from the O-Club were as bright as the sun on a summer’s day. Jimmy could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body as he walked to the door. As he moved closer to the board Jimmy felt like Moses. The crowd began to part like the Red Sea. Scanning down the chart, his stomach got tighter, and he broke out in a cold sweat.

“Scheduled to fly but…scratched in the nite. It’s getting on the nerves. When you hear you are flying start tightening up…don’t sleep well, tension mounts, get off the ground have passes a minor climax, grows as near the target, not conscious of any physical discomforts, even if you were cold, guts in a ball. After target, breath a sigh of relief, tension goes out when finally land, really all washed up…it seems that too many of the guys are trying to quit. The Colonel sorta laid the law down.”

The next morning Jimmy was woken up by the sunlight breaking through the holes in the tent. Jimmy thought, “This sho’ is a beautiful day, maybe I’ll just head over yonder to the football field. While they are playing, Jimmy thought, “playing football can make a guy forget about the war that is going on around him.”

When he left the football field, Jimmy headed back to his tent to clean up for lunch. As he entered the tent, he saw a letter on his rack, and opened it. All of a sudden, Jimmy’s stomach curled into a ball, adrenaline began to pump, and his eyes watered. Later Jimmy wrote, “Recovered all bodies of Shaener’s Crew. Capt. Tennilles included…flew into the side of a mountain in a snow storm. At first, couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. Shaener and whole crew never knew what happened.”

Jimmy had been in Italy for five months and he still was not used to his friends dieing. “People say you get used to friends dieing, but gettin’ used to people dieing is somethin’ I hope I never get used to. The guys who do, walk around with blank stares, like there is no one home,” wrote Jimmy in his journal. As he put the letter in his journal the air siren began to go off. So he threw on his flight suit, and headed to the briefing tent.

In the tent, Jimmy learned the squadron was to have an emergency mission to bomb an industrial park in northern Italy, which was about to ship a new type of tank armor that was impenetrable to anything that the Allies had, as well as a new German armor piercing shell.

After settling into his seat in the plane, Jimmy noticed that he was not nearly as nervous as he normally was. When the engines started, they let out a roar, and the plane was covered in a plume of smoke.

As the squadron flew over the Italian coast Jimmy and the other gunners made their way to their positions to prepare for the Luftwaffe fighters hiding in the clouds. When he finally managed to cram himself into his tiny nose-gunner compartment, fifteen German Focke-Wulf 190s dove out of the clouds and attacked the squadron.

“These damn 190s are like the nats back home,” yelled Jimmy over the intercom system. Leading a 190 with his gun, Jimmy felt his heart racing. As he pulled the trigger he was pelted with the hot spent shells from his cannon.

The intercom system in the plane was alive with the chatter of the gunners telling each other where the German fighters were heading.

“Jimmy, we got one comin’ up from behind, get him as he goes over”

“Daniels, two comin’ in low and fast at 3 o’clock”

By now the sky was full of 190s. “Man this is like a pheasant hunt back home,” yelled Daniels. Soon Jimmy realized that he has been shooting so much that his barrel was white hot, almost the color of a pair of angel’s wings.

Next thing Jimmy knew, there was a 190 headed straight for him, his heart began to beat so hard that it seemed like it was about to jump out. Squeezing the trigger as hard as he could, bullets begin to fly out of his twin cannons. They tore into the 190. Jimmy saw chunks of the wings fly off behind the muzzle flashes of the 190, which could have illuminated even the darkest night. Finally, the engine burst into flames and Jimmy watched the plane as it made a dive toward the ground.

All of a sudden the plane was shook by an explosion. Captian Williams called over the intercom,

“What was that”

“Turbulence I think,” says Ware

“Jimmy you see anything?”

He scanned the sky, and saw black smoke pouring out of a plane in the lower level of the formation, as it fell to the ground.

“Captain Williams, it’s Major Owen’s plane sir, its left wing is gone!”

When squadron was over the target area, the sound of the bomb bay doors opening was like sweet music to Jimmy. Then all of a sudden, it was like a downpour on a summer after noon. The sky is full of green chucks of metal, and in a matter of seconds the sky was clear as if nothing happened.

The ride home was all a bit of a blur to Jimmy. It was not until he heard the screech of the tires on the runway that he realized that he was home. When he got back to his tent after the debriefing, he pulled out his journal, “Able #1 got a direct hit at the base of left wing. Immediately burst into solid flame, wing buckled up. Fuselage went down, other wing up. Then whole mass flaming wreckage. Went down…an inferno with 10 men in its heart…will never forget it. Knew all the boys. Close my eyes, there it is. Said a little prayer for their souls. That gets you somewhere that the medicine can’t reach.”