Letters from the Crowells came at regular intervals all through the dark of my second Northern European winter. London is located at a latitude that is even farther north than Newfoundland in Canada. It was dark when I went to the office and dark when I left. The combined mixture of fog and coal smoke created an atmosphere right out of a Dickens novel, and the leaden skies and the cold, dreary days were something you had to get used to, or you could find yourself checking sailing dates back to the States.
I felt comfortable enough with the Crowells to share with them that I had fallen in love with a young man from Arizona. I gave them all the particulars: six feet, sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, even tempered, intelligent, and a better conversationalist than Mr. Darcy.
On a rare sunny Saturday morning, Rob and I were sitting in Trafalgar Square feeding the pigeons when he told me about growing up in Flagstaff in Arizona’s High Country. If you were heading to the Grand Canyon or traveling the Lincoln Highway between Chicago and Los Angeles, you probably drove by his uncle’s Sinclair gas station on Route 66 where he had a part-time job. At home, Rob wore dungarees, boots, and a Stetson, and he could ride a horse and rope a calf. He considered his childhood of growing up in the big-sky country of the American West to be idyllic, with its clean air and mountain backdrops, especially in light of what he had seen and experienced in Europe.
When the war broke out, Rob had joined the Army where his high scores qualified him for the Air Corps. Unlike most other airmen, Rob did not want to be a pilot, and when I asked him why, he said, “The most important factor in the success of a mission, at least the things you can control, is the skill of the pilot and co-pilot. If they screw up, you’re dead. Formation flying, when you have hundreds of planes going up at the same time, is an exact science, and there isn’t any room for error. I didn’t want the responsibility for the lives of nine other guys. I felt the best position for me was as a navigator, and the Army agreed.”
In December 1943, Rob was sent to Kearney, Nebraska, to pick up the B-17 he and his crewmates were to fly to England. Stationed at an airfield in Hertfordshire, Rob had flown nineteen missions when his plane was hit by flak over Stuttgart killing the bombardier, his friend, Pat Monaghan. With the navigator’s position right behind the bombardier’s, metal and plastic fragments from the shattered Plexiglas nose of the plane had torn through Rob’s right arm, with pieces of shrapnel flying into his face and shoulder. Tiny bits of metal had to be removed from his eye by a specialist in Oxford, but it healed well enough for him to resume combat status.
“After I got out of the hospital, I figured I’d be assigned to a new crew, but when I reported, the squadron commander told me I had been promoted to captain and that he had cut orders for me to become a lead navigator for the squadron. If that wasn’t bad enough, while I was in the hospital, the Air Corps raised the required missions to thirty. So instead of owing Uncle Sam six missions, I owed him eleven. The major said that too many men had completed twenty five missions and were going home. Losing so many experienced crew members was compromising the effectiveness of the group, and so they had to raise the number of missions to keep experienced airmen flying. Also, because of better fighter support, we weren’t as likely to get shot down even though planes from the 91st Bomb Group were getting shot down on a regular basis.
“Flying lead meant it would take a hell of a lot longer for me to finish the last eleven missions because you don’t fly as often and because it’s so god-damned dangerous. The German fighters often zeroed in on the lead plane trying to kill the pilots, so that it would mess up the whole formation. On one of my early missions, a Messerschmitt didn’t pull up soon enough and flew right into the lead ship. I saw the fire, heard the explosion, and then it was gone. Just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “ten guys were dead — ten guys from my squadron.
“On my next to last mission, I was assigned to a plane flying ‘tail-end Charlie,’ which is the rear of the low squadron and is as bad, if not worse, than flying lead. That’s where the fighters pick you off. Our target was a factory in the Ruhr Valley where we encountered so many fighters that it was like flying through a swarm of bees. We were shot up so badly that we nearly had to bail out in the Channel. Instead, we limped into Kent and made a very rough landing in a turnip field, with a wounded tail gunner and a flight engineer with a broken leg.”
For a few minutes, we sat side by side in complete silence. It wouldn’t have helped to tell Rob that, before he had even reached England, my cousin, Pat Faherty, had died when his ship was sunk off the East Coast, or to talk about the twenty-five men from Minooka and South Scranton who were killed in Europe and the Pacific. Sharing that information would not have lessened the pain of losing Pat Monaghan and those ten men from his squadron.
As we walked toward the Underground station, Rob took my hand and put it in his overcoat pocket. “Since I’m in such a good mood, and you have asked about my girlfriend in Flagstaff, I’ll tell you about Alice.” Rob found it amusing that girls always seemed to want to know about old flames, but guys never. As far as men were concerned, once a relationship was over, you were ancient history and about as interesting.
Rob had dated Alice, a waitress who worked in a café near the college, during his last year in school. Before he left for basic training, Alice had started talking about getting married, but Rob had made it clear that marriage was out of the question because just too many things could go wrong, especially when your future included flying bombers over Germany. During his training, he had witnessed a crash where the pilot had just barely gotten off the ground when something went wrong, and the fully-fueled Fortress exploded on impact killing everyone on board. While Rob was in the hospital in England, Alice had written to tell him she was marrying someone else. If their break-up had distressed him in any way, he was hiding it admirably.
While waiting for my train in the Underground station, I asked Rob if he had met anyone while he was in England, and that’s when I found out about Millie. The two met at a dance at the airfield sponsored by the Red Cross, and they hit it off right away. Rob told Millie about Alice, and Millie told Rob about her boyfriend, who was in the Royal Navy. They agreed to enjoy each other’s company until her boyfriend returned to England. Millie might explain why Rob was not more upset when he got his Dear John letter. He had been stepping out on Alice.
I asked, if Millie had not had a boyfriend, would he have married her, and he said, “No way. Millie was a great girl. She lived in Royston, which was only four miles from the base. I’d ride over on my bike to see her, but that was the extent of it.”
What Millie provided more than anything, more than the sex, was female companionship. Rob had tired of listening to men bullshit about their flying experiences. If all the claimed kills of German fighters were true, then there wouldn’t have been any Focke Wulfs or Messerschmitts left in the Luftwaffe, and since there was no shortage of fighters when Rob flew, he didn’t want to hear it anymore. So a pleasant evening spent with a pretty, young English girl was preferable to a night of pub hopping with guys who drank to mask the fear everyone felt who flew bombers over Germany.
After learning about Alice and Millie, I was left with the impression that Rob liked relationships that didn’t require a commitment on his part, which was going to put him at odds with me.