OK, you asked for it.
ONE WAY OUT OF THURLEIGH
Flight Officer Gustavus Bowmaker lifted off Thurleigh Field for the thirteenth time with a letter in his leather flight suit and a song in his heart. “Only twelve more missions after this,” he thought. Heck, he was halfway home.
Even First Lieutenant Borsch didn't bother Bowmaker today. Borsch outranked him, but the 8th Air Force assigned the left hand seat to the best pilots and Borsch didn't cut it. Borsch bitterly resented the farm-boy-without-commission who gave the orders in this B-17, and it showed. He wanted his own ship and imagined that the only way he would get it was to get out of Thurleigh. Until then, he tired of flying after fifteen minutes or so, and when the crew tried to bring him in to the fold by cutting his neck tie off like they did for every incoming officer on the ship, he fought them and got a nasty cut. Bowmaker could handle the extra flying, but the crew—the crew treasured its rituals and never forgave Borsch.
None of that mattered on this mission, number-thirteen, over-the-hump, downhill-from-here, home-by-Christmas mission. Flight Officer Bowmaker smiled, and gave the order to test fire the guns.
The gunners always enjoyed test firing. Some of them were farm boys too, and drew a good lead with a shotgun back in Idaho at the training grounds. Tiny Johnson, curled up in the ball turret, was best. Back in Idaho he was so deadly with a shotgun that the training officer tried to keep him back to train new gunners. The 8th Air Force, mindful of the shortage of men who could both shoot and squeeze into the ball turret, ordered him to Thurleigh and let the second best gunner, a large man, stay in Idaho to train more gunners.
Bowmaker felt the Fortress shudder at the short burst from the guns and relaxed. No jams this time. Good. It would be a long flight, and flak would be thicker than pea soup over the target....
Borsch's mood was sour, like spoiled soup. He had no letter in his pocket and no one to send him one from back home. When the British girl rebuffed his overture last night he sulked in a bottle. It left him with a headache that woke up with him for the mission briefing, and clung to him like a leather flight helmet that was two sizes too small.
"Copilot to gunners: Knock off that firing, Dammit!" It was wasted breath. They were already relaxing, and the firing lived on only in his head. And oh, did it ever hurt.
Bowmaker nodded to Borsch and yielded up the stick for his customary tour of the ship before entering enemy territory. The short stretch felt good, even in the cramped confines between the bomb racks.
"Thank God I'm not tiny like Tiny!" he thought to himself, grateful that his size exceeded the maximum for ball turret gunners. The scarcity of small stature determined where farm boys flew, not the native feel for the stick that put Flight Officer Bowmaker in the left hand first pilot’s seat.
He much preferred the cockpit of the Flying Fortress. Even if he had to share it with Lt. Borsch. The spoiled ...
…Spoiled soup was an apt description of First Lieutenant Borsch. “Soup,” in fact, was the friendly nickname given to him by the British liaison officer on his first day at Thurleigh. The Brit, whose parents had toured St. Petersburg, Russia just before it was renamed Petrograd in a wave of patriotism at the start of the Great War, was raised on the tart soup they made from beet stock. He loved borsch and for him “Soup” was the perfect nickname for Lieutenant Borsch. Soon, it became obvious to all that the Lieutenant was indeed spoiled. But “Soup” stuck. Everyone, including his few friends, called him “Soup” to his face. “Spoiled Soup” was the understood conveyance of the name to those who had to fly with him.
The British liaison issued Flight Officer Gustavus Bowmaker a nickname too. A deeply religious man, Bowmaker was never without his Holy Bible. Variations of the Cross--embossed in gold on the cover--found their way into his constant doodling on every scrap of paper he could find around the barracks.
“Cross,” said the Brit within earshot of half the American fliers at Thurleigh, “Stay out of my office! I can’t spare any paper for your bloody doodling.”
Flight Officer Gustavus Bowmaker’s crew was merciless. They teased him so relentlessly that he finally drew a Cross in the form of a crossbow, and thereafter filled scraps of paper with drawings of the ancient weapon. Suspecting that a fierce warrior spirit dwelled in the heart of their skipper, the crew finally let off their teasing.
“Cross” stuck on Bowmaker just like “Soup” fastened on Borsch. It was “Cross, would you open the bomb bay so I can take a leak?” “Cross, did you get another letter from your sweetie?” “Cross, how about a pass for the weekend?”
“Cross, let’s paint a babe on the ship and call her ‘Bare-able You!’” Cross put his foot down on that one. It didn’t square with his Presbyterian scruples.
“Cross! Bandits! Ten O’Clock high!” “I got one, Cross!”
The crew slowly formed into a fighting unit, and Cross was its undisputed leader. All except “Soup.” Soup Borsch was just as sour as ever.
Tiny complained that Lieutenant Borsch was always cranky but nobody called him cross. “Just call him ‘Soup,’ Tiny. I have to keep the peace around here, and I don’t want him any crankier than he is already.”
Lieutenant Borsch applied for another transfer out of the base at Thurleigh, but “Cross” Bowmaker refused to send his request up to the CO. “I need a good co-pilot,” he said, “You’re it.” Soup was not really a good co-pilot, but Bowmaker had learned on the farm to deal with his own problems. He wasn’t about to inflict Borsch on somebody else.
Soup Borsch persisted. Each failure made him more sullen, but he kept repeating, “I gotta get out of Thurleigh!” Over and over and over again.
Well inside Germany, a small sortie of Luftwaffe fighters attacked the formation. The fighters paid dearly for their attack, but the lead plane lost an engine and the entire formation was forced to drop thousand feet to gain airspeed for the bomb run on Hanover.
Flying Fortresses in formation strike fear into the heart of the enemy on the ground, and that fear rises up in the form of blossoms of flak, blacker than coal dust. Flak bursts harmlessly below the Forts at 27,500 feet altitude, but the loss of a thousand feet gave flak an edge.
“Cross! Cross! Fire in Number Two!” Cross felt it before he heard the waist gunner’s cry. He knew this feeling. It was familiar. For an instant in his mind, he was a boy back on the farm pushing sheep into the pen. An unruly buck sheep didn’t take kindly to the lasso he had put around its neck—the Fortress felt like that, an unruly buck sheep on the end of a rope. Cross feathered the prop on Number Two.
“Pilot to crew: hold steady for the bomb run,” was all Cross said. “Bomb doors open.” Then, “She’s yours, Nord.” Nord, the bombardier, got his nickname from the crew, who marveled at the Norden bomb sight that no one but he understood.
Nord and the Norden bomb sight did their best to fly the Fort steady, but it was an unruly buck sheep on the end of a rope. Finally, the gyros and adjustment knobs came together for an instant, and when the contact points met Nord cried “Bombs Away!” The Fortress lurched as the bombs slid out of their racks into oblivion.
“Fire in Number Three, Cross!” Cross feathered Number Three. The buck sheep fought the rope. Cross held the course, but the ship was losing altitude fast.
“Pilot to crew: Everybody out!” Cross exclaimed. Soup Borsch looked at Cross frantically, his eyes wide as saucers. “Everybody!” Cross said. Borsch unbuckled his harness and scrambled to the deck, where the upper turret gunner was already stepping out to the bomb rack to bail out. The radio operator dropped through the bomb bay from the rear, and then the turret gunner was gone.
Borsch froze, his hands clamped to the bomb rack like a vise. Through the bomb bay he could see Nord, the bombardier, and the navigator falling away from the ship. The waist gunners, tail gunner, and Tiny, the ball turret gunner went out the rear, but he couldn’t see them. He just stood there, hanging on to the bomb rack.
Cross put the ship on the failing autopilot and unshackled his harness. When he got to the deck just forward of the bomb bay, Soup Borsch was still blocking the way, clamped solidly to the empty bomb rack.
“Time to go, Soup!” Cross exclaimed. “Go!”
Soup held fast.
“Come on! Go! Jump!” Cross shouted into the rattling wind.
“I can’t! I have to get out of Thurleigh!”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant! Jump!” Cross yelled.
“I’m afraid!”
The Flying Fortress, unofficially known as “Bare-able You,” was chattering now like a sheep pen full of sheep with a circling coyote. In a moment, it would collapse.
“There’s one way out of Thurleigh, Soup. Take it!” Cross said.
Cross jumped up from the deck and grasped the bomb rack with both hands a foot over Borsch’s head, placed both of his feet on the co-pilot’s back and gave a mighty shove. Borsch fell free, and seconds later Cross saw his parachute blossom.
Cross’s own chute billowed seconds later.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
But that is another story.
--The End--
Author’s note:
Some might be tempted to discount people like the fictional First Lieutenant Soup Borsch, if indeed they exist, but in my view they are in their own way heroes like the entire Greatest Generation that the fictional character Flight Officer Gustavus Bowmaker, my mother and father, my wife’s mother and father, and so many others came from.
Hero and coward alike, they put their lives on the line for us. We must, all of us, be eternally grateful to them.
This story is dedicated to Flight Officer Norman A. Armbrust, United States Army Air Corps, and Technical Sergeant James D. Ellen, United States Marine Corps, and their comrades in arms, heroes all.
Record-Herald, March 20, 2003, Vol 142-080 Washington CH, Ohio, 43160
That job of protecting this country's freedom brought [Norman A.] Armbrust to fly bombing missions over Germany in 1943. When his B-17 was struck, "It was like somebody lassoing us and pulling us back," he said.
The bombers were supposed to fly at 27,500 feet, but because a lead plane needed to pick up airspeed, the planes went into the mission at 26,500 feet. "If we went over at 27,500 that flak would have missed us," he said. "Guess I was in the right place at the wrong time."
The B-17 carried a crew of 10. After the strike, the engines began to fail, sparks began to fly, and one engine caught on fire. The crew bailed out of the damaged plane. One eventually died in a hospital, and nine made it back home.
Stalag 3 was made famous in the movie, "The Great Escape." Armbrust said. He was at the prisoner camp during the escape that saw 88 soldiers escape. Fifty of them were caught and shot.
Armbrust was released on April 29, 1945, but he and others were not moved out of Germany until May 8, 1945.
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