I found my grandpa’s extremely unfinished memoirs from his time as a B-26 flight engineer in the 38th Repair Squadron, and wow. You could never call him a writer, but boy are there some stories.
Picture my grandpa just chilling at Capodichino Airfield near Naples one Saturday morning. The weather is fine, and everything’s going great. His CO walks in with some pilot and asks him if he knows where his friend Sam – a B-24 flight engineer – went to. Apparently this guy was off in the city having fun with his girlfriend, so my grandpa just kinda shrugged.
That doesn’t satisfy either his CO or the pilot, who are clearly on a mission. They explain how they need Sam to engineer the flight of some B-24 that made an emergency landing in a pasture south of Pompeii about 20 or 30 miles away, and they’d been patching up ever since. My grandpa says he knows some guys who just got out of B-24 mechanic’s school and he’d ask them. Unfortunately, it turns out none of them are actually qualified to be flight crew.
The CO really wants to get this plane back to Capodichino though. They need bombers up at the front, and they’ll be damned if they’re gonna let a multi-million dollar heavy bomber just rust into nothingness. So the CO suggests my grandpa fill in for Sam as flight engineer, with he and the pilot – one Captain George – completing the crew.
Now, let me explain the experience of our adventuring party with the Consolidated B-24 Liberator:
Pilot (Captain George): Tagged along on a B-24 flight as co-pilot once. Copilot (Captain Thomas, the CO): Flew on a B-24 as a passenger. Flight Engineer (Corporal Mollen, my grandfather): Once saw a few B-24s about 10,000 feet overhead in North Africa.
Needless to say, my grandpa has questions. Is his CO suicidal, for instance? Does his CO think he’s suicidal? But holy shit do they want this bomber back. And, truth be told, so does my grandpa. He knows Sam has been working hard on this plane, and doesn’t want his work to go to waste. Besides, they’re doing all this in the name of beating the eternal shit out of the Nazis, and my grandpa’s Jеwish blood demands he take action. So, they all hop in the jeep and drive out to this pasture.
And it is a pasture, complete with grazing sheep, rusting tractor, and a golem of aluminum and literal duct tape that was, perhaps, once a Consolidated B-24 Liberator of the USAAF.
This plane clearly had clearly seen some shit. 88mm flak had ripped jagged holes all through the plane, which Sam had patched with tape. The #3 engine’s propeller was obviously taken from some other mystery plane: not a B-24. This kind of jury-rigging wasn’t particularly uncommon, but generally those maintenance flights were carried out from prepared runways by experienced crews. Not from a bracingly short and shockingly bumpy pasture in the middle of Italy by three guys who had maybe seen this kind of plane before, once, from 10,000 feet below.
They start by ripping out seats, map cases, and anything else that could come out. There’s fuel in four tanks, but my grandpa figures the contents of one tank can get them to Capodichino and drains the rest.
While his CO and the pilot discuss navigation, my grandpa decides to start the engines for a pre-flight check. Now, my grandpa sells himself short in his version, but he was a clever man. The R-2800s of the B-26s he’s used to working on aren’t so different from the R-1830s on the B-24, and presumably he has the manual open. Shockingly, engines #1, #2, and #4 run well enough, but the #3 with the mismatched prop is, as one may imagine, desperately ill and bitter about life. Unfortunately, they need that power for takeoff, so they decide to risk running it anyway, then cutting and feathering it as soon as they safely can.
They taxi to the extreme end of the field, and begin their run. With incredible jolts in every direction and a horrible racket, they accelerate until, to my grandpa’s amazement, the plane rotates and begins the steep climb out.
And it has to be a steep climb out, because rising out of the Italian landscape past the end of the pasture are mountains. This is, after all, an Italian landscape. Still, they are airborne and climbing steadily. The B-24 was blessed and cursed by its light construction and Davis wing, but it mercifully carries this plane and its terrified crew off towards Naples. They are relieved.
Perhaps too relieved. Between the pasture south of Pompeii and the airfield near Naples is Mount Vesuvius: a volcano which, in 1944, was very much active. This isn’t a problem; in fact it’s quite beautiful. Captain George, however, wonders aloud if it’s true you can feel the updraft flying low over the mouth. Not waiting for an answer, he banks towards the great rising plumes of smoke and ash. My grandpa watches the natural wonder in awe: both at its natural beauty, and at the audacity of the pilot for taking a barely airworthy plane near a sputtering volcano. History is silent as to whether or not the pilot felt any updrafts.
They soon make sight of the airfield and, not having the fuel to stay around, begin setting up for the landing. Apparently someone at Capodichino got wind of the three dubiously qualified guys flying a barely airworthy Liberator back and had rallied all the emergency vehicles. As the plane nears the corrugated steal runway, my grandpa wonders for a terrifying moment if he’d forgotten to do the pre-landing procedure, but he doesn’t have long to think about it. The landing happens very quickly: with a “huge jolt and a crashing sound.”
Nonetheless, the plane comes to a stop safely and without incident, with an immensely relieved crew safely on board. The next day, Sam gets to work getting the plane back to operational status. By around that time next week, they’d succeed. One fully repaired B-24 Liberator stands proud in the Italian sun. Glowing with satisfaction, the men of the 38th Repair Squadron test their machine before sending it off, and are so happy with themselves for making do with limited resources that they almost don’t notice the low drone of approaching aircraft. It seems even the Germans wanted to see the Americans’ handiwork as they dropped bomb after bomb, turning the freshly repaired B-24 sitting in the middle of the field into a pile of charred metal.
“C’est la guerre,” he writes.
