· RUEL SK

The Aftermath
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33 out of39 (sic): "All the guys in the hut were sweating me out and old Rose had tears in
his eyes when I came in."
Herbert Schwartz decided he would try his very best to never return to flight status
agam.
The hazards inherent in reassignments had taken its toll of close friends. Coming
back from a three-day pass, pilot Prescott W. Coleman looked for his former navigator, Lt.
John Dent. "Jack hailed from Hollywood, California and epitomized everything that I was
raised to disdain. He drank, he womanized, he expressed himself in colorfully libidinous
terms and he worried about nothing. Furthermore, he was short, bounced on the balls of his
feet when he walked and found humor everywhere. Jack and I spent a lot of time together,
perhaps on the basis that opposites attract. We baited each other unmercifully but mostly
without rancor."
"You don't have to worry - nothing ever happens when I am along," Jack Dent had
said to bombardier Malcom MacGregor. Both went down with Fort Worth Maid and Jack
died. After all, he was half right, MacGregor reached the ground alive.
Second Lt. John J. Becker was also the victim of bad luck. He was the original
bombardier of the Dewey crew, but died when the Walther crew went down while he was
assigned to it.
Staff Sergeant Ferdinand K. Flach, nose turret gunner on the Smith crew, and S/Sgt.
Lee R. J. Huffman, were assigned for this mission to the Bruland crew. Both parachuted
safely from Bruland's airplane and both were shot to death by German military personnel.
The original crews ofboth men made it back.
In part because of combat losses, the combat crews did not get very close to those
outside their own crew. After a while, veterans learned not to have any really close friends.
It was easier that way. Though they usually recognized people by sight. It seemed to those
who didn't fly that fateful day that those who were not on the base were all MIA. So it was
a shock, on their return. to someone who had been on leave. Tail gunner Tom North
walked into his barrack to catch a cleaning party stripping his bunk. It was as if they were
seeing a ghost. Needless to say he straightened them out in no uncertain tenns.
Some survivors let off a little steam on the new crews which were quickly
dispatched to rebuild the 445 th . Lieutenant Donald Whitefield put on his .45 and steel