Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

Free Sample Chapters 67
were on course. Some of the other pilots broke radio silence to needle
me a little. They said things like, “Where the hell are we?” and “I bet we
overshot the target.” Just what I needed to hear! When someone said,
“Christ, we must be over Russia!” I said, “Gowdy Red, here. Radio
silence! Got it?” I knew their voices; I knew who was needling me.
They didn’t make it any easier on my frame of mind. I had to worry
about making the rendezvous in that lousy weather, but I also had to
worry that maybe the bombers would be in the damn overcast and that
I’d find them by running into them. And I was really concerned that I
hadn’t made the course good, or that the bombers were ahead or behind
schedule—or something.
Suddenly I was looking at a big break in the clouds. For the first
time on the whole mission, since I’d left England, I could see the ground.
And all I could see was a huge urban area. There were red-tile roofs as
far as the eye could see. What with the time on the clock—1300,
exactly— it had to be Berlin. Voices on the group radio net started coming
up with, “Hey, that looks like Berlin!” and “Yeah, it must be.” Then
someone called out, “There’re the bombers!”
I looked to my left, and there they were—B-17s. And then, right
then, someone else called, “Bogies! Two and three o’clock!” It was a
three-way rendezvous. I found out later that we were about twenty-five
miles southwest of the city center. That meant we were a little behind
schedule, or the bombers were a little ahead. But it was a perfect
rendezvous anyway.
I had been flying at 26,000 feet all the way in. My high squadron
was at around 27,000 feet and my low squadron was at about 25,000
feet. The bombers were stacked between 22,000 and 26,000 feet. There
were clouds over us at about 28,000 feet and clouds underneath us at
about 15,000 feet. It was hazy between the cloud layers, but the vis-ibility
was adequate.
There were German fighters stacked all the way from the level of
the bombers to the upper cloud ceiling. They were still just specks when
I saw them. They looked like a swarm of bees, maybe seven to ten miles
distant. They were going flat-out head-on to the bombers. Thirty or forty
twin-engine fighters were going in first to fire rockets in order to break