|
|
|
|
Life In a Tent By Martin A. Rush - 767th Squadron While our friends in the infantry curled up in their foxholes and were gazing pityingly up at us in our bomber formations getting shot at with no place to hide, most of us, I think, took that in stride philosophically as an unfortunate aspect of our life as combat crew. I doubt if many of us would have traded palaces (that word was meant to be "places," but the slip was not too far off), with them wallowing in mud or burrowing into the ground like moles to escape enemy fire. We had the consolation of knowing that if we made it home at night after a mission, we lived in comparative comfort and with a degree of civilization that our alleged Yankee ingenuity was constantly trying to improve. The following description is simply a recounting for our families and friends, the way in which we tried to make the best of what was meant to be field conditions, and was I think, typical of most of our common experience. We knew that we would be there for as long as it took to fly our required missions, or until we got shot down, whichever came first. We knew it would be a matter of months, at least, and in the case of our crew, it was about nine months. Our crew spent some extra time practicing night flying, and eventually flew one single-ship night mission to Munich, where we went over the middle of the downtown area dropping bombs one at a time, in a long line. The flak was not so scary, since you couldn't see the black smoke that came with each antiaircraft shell, or specifically, the burst of three, most of the time. In the dark, if they were near misses, they were simply little orange kernels of flame ahead of the wing - but nasty! In the roar of the engines, of course, I couldn't hear them, and they were like ghostly fireworks. The logic of these night flights, as we were told, was that we did not expect to inflict casualties - we were simply trying to disrupt traffic, and keep the workers of the armament factories sitting up all night in bomb shelters. It was hoped that this would make them sleepy on the job, and lower their efficiency. In addition, each load of bombs would include at least one booby trap bomb that would bury itself in the ground and not go off - unless it were bothered. Their people knew, or soon learned, that about one and a half turns on one of the fuses to remove it, would set it off. The booby trap bombs also were said to contain vials of acid which, if left alone, would eat its way out of its container and release a coiled spring to set off the bomb. This interval could be a matter of hours, or days, or weeks. Meanwhile, the half-buried bomb would be cordoned off, the area cleared, and traffic rerouted around the block, thereby adding to the disorganization of the area, and the inconvenience of our adversaries. It was a little scary flying at night, without any other ships along and it was silent and black out there. If we had radar (I presume we did) it was rather primitive. I was flying co-pilot, and monitoring the radio. When we passed over the Gargano promontory (the spur of the Italian boot) coming back to Italy, I radioed out in the black night, "Darky, Darky, this is Easy Dog Seven. Where are we?" There was a moment's pause, and a reassuring calm voice said into my headphones, "Easy Dog Seven, this is Darky. Will you make your statement again?" I repeated it, and then came the answer, "Easy Dog Seven, take a heading of 274 and hold it for eight minutes, and you will see the lights of your field off your left wing." It was smooth as silk, just like he said. I was told that the Darky system had monitoring stations all over Italy, and when you transmitted, a minimum of three stations locked onto your radio transmission, triangulated your position, and gave a heading to get you to your base. It was wonderful, and we didn't seem so alone up there in the dark. Meanwhile, back at the airfield, would be our tents, all cozy and comfy - as much as we could make them to be. Few of us, of course, settled for the original dimensions of the tent. Two of the chest-high side flaps would be raised and put under rope tensions to make more roof. Others have described how we would make expeditions with G.I. trucks to places like Potenza, where they had large tufa-stone quarries. We would load the truck with as many of the building-block-sized soft stone blocks as we could get on the truck, and also a pretty good load of local bricks, to be used as flooring, and in our case, for a dividing wall for a shower stall to be built inside the tent. The heating arrangement was fashioned from one half of a 55 gallon drum, the open end jammed into the sand. The chimney was set onto the flat top of the stove, over the hole of the opening for filling the drum, and was probably enlarged by some helpful lineman to allow the smoke to come up and out of the stove and up the chimney. The chimney was fashioned, rather colorfully, I thought, from discarded brass 75 mm. antiaircraft shell casings, with the butt ends sliced off. Since they tapered down from the firing cap end toward the projectile end, they nested nicely, but made a chimney of seriously constricted caliber. This was demonstrated dramatically by the frequency with which they became choked with soot accumulating inside the chimney, from burning the government issue fuel oil. Many times when we dismantled the chimneys, we found that the tube was choked down from its original 75 mm. (enlarged from the three inches to about five by sawing off the constricted projectile end) to about an opening that would barely admit your finger. No wonder they smoked so badly The fuel oil was made to burn by bringing it in copper tubing under the bricks of the floor from a tank lying on its side outside the tent, propped up on tufa stones to allow gravity feed to the stove. Copper tubing was salvaged from wrecked aircraft, which of course were sufficiently available from accidents on takeoff or from attempts to land disabled aircraft. The firecup itself was one of the butt ends of a 75 mm. antiaircraft shell. The long central core reaching up into the powder chamber was removed, making it a heavy, sturdy cup. The copper pipe from the tank outside didn't drip directly into the cup for burning fuel oil, but was formed into a coil suspended above the cup, and ended down leading into the cup. The flickering flames of the cold oil would heat the copper coils full of fuel oil above it, and it would come squirting out, cooked and preheated, and making a reassuring roar, with a fairly hot flame. However, after cleaning out our choked chimney a few times on those cold Italian mornings, we decided to join what I thought to be a majority of the troops, in shifting from fuel oil to raw, 100 octane which did not need to be preheated. It, of course, was so volatile that I am told some of the guys used it as fluid in their Zippo lighters. I know that while it was not exactly safe, it gave off a hot flame and a lot less smoke and soot. It was quite a trick to light it without blowing up the tent. The small airhole of the oil drum was placed directly over the fire cup, and we would drip a few drops of gasoline into the cup, then drop a lighted match through the airhole, leaping away from it as we dropped the match. It would ignite with a "whoosh", and usually raise the "stove" off the floor a few inches, then settle down to a satisfying roar. It is remarkable that we never had a fiery explosion in the tent, although I do remember that at least one of the tents burned down. I never found out why, but it was rather scary, having all that gasoline just on the other side of a canvas wall. It helps to explain why so many of our aircraft burst into flames over the target when they caught flak in the wings. With that thin aluminum skin and the rubber gas tanks in the wings, we made a pretty good target. Each one of us got a straw-filled mattress from the natives to soften our cots. We also built frames around our cots so we could hang our mosquito netting around us. Those mosquitoes were hungry. In our tent area, since we were near headquarters, there was a local power line that came through the area, and one of our bombardiers was an electrical engineer (so I was told) and had climbed one of the poles with a transformer to reduce the power in the lines from several thousand volts to around a more useful 110 volts. We all sent home for electric light bulbs, and voila! we had lights in our tent. Most of us rigged up a light inside our netcovered bunks, so we could lie there in mosquito-free luxury as in a canopied bed, and read or write letters home. About the shower. I remember vaguely that we rigged up a couple of empty drums elevated upon tufa stone platforms, and connected some mixing pipes and spigots and a used Italian cooking stove for one of the tanks. There was a bricked floor angled into a drain pipe out the side of the tent and into a tile pipe leading to a sinking pit filled with gravel and sand. A few times we heated the water and took turns at the shower (Don't waste the water!). It was handy in the winter, and avoided the long walk down the hill into the valley where the shower house was, but we didn't use it much. I think it was more that we were stimulated by the challenge of building it. I seem to remember that we had a crude door, with hinges, instead of the regulation tent flap, so it seemed more like a little house than a tent. But I suspect that I have refurbished it in memory more than it really was. Anyway, it was a lot better than sleeping in a foxhole, and we were grateful for the luxury. If you're going to take part in a war, it doesn't hurt to take as many of the discomforts out of it as you can. |
|
Send mail to
webmaster@461st.org with
questions or comments about this web site.
|
