Free The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 by Stephen Ambrose Page A

instruments and ignore your senses.” He also learned to use radio communications between the aircraft and the control tower.39 The hardest part was night flying in formation. “Beginners in formation always overcontrol,” Watry pointed out, “fighting to hold the proper formation position with wild bursts of power, followed by sudden frantic yanking of the throttles rearward when it appears that the wing of the lead plane is about to be chewed up by the propeller of the airplane flying the wing position.” Beginners tried to hold lateral position using only the rudders, but as Watry said, in that case “the airplane is likely to wallow through the air like a goose waddling to its pond.” It was worse at night. The wingman would try to stay in proper position when all he could see was a white light on the tail of the lead plane. To Watry, it seemed his airplane “floated in a void.” If there were no lights on the ground and clouds were overhead, there would be no indication of movement.40 Because of the number of accidents, Eleanor and the other wives, living alone except on the brief weekends, were worried sick about their husbands. Every time they heard a crash or a fire engine, they were almost petrified that their man had gone down.
    McGovern worked hard at his training. He had to, as he realized from reports coming out of England about the Eighth Air Force and the stories he heard from returning veteran pilots about what combat was like. And he knew the dangers of flying from the number of accidents happening around him. In October 1943, air cadet Ken Barmore was in advanced, flying an AT-9, when he got word that two of his best friends from high school were killed in a B-24 crash at Elk, California, while they were on their last training flight before going overseas.41 Not all accidents were fatal, but some were, and none were comical except once when an air cadet pilot got lost in his formation on a black night. Others were also lost and trying to find the lead plane. “It was awful,” McGovern said.  “People were scared to death.” So this one pilot saw a little white light ahead.  He started flying toward it, thinking that was the light on the wing of the lead plane. After a couple of minutes, his co-pilot tapped him and said, “You’re going 400 miles per hour.” The AT-9 could only do 150 mph. The pilot realized that what he was doing was mistaking the light, which was in fact on the ground, as being from the lead plane, and he had his AT-9 in a sharp dive. He pulled back hard, figuring that would pull the plane up, but as McGovern said, “That’s not the way it works - if a plane is going down and you pull the nose up, the plane keeps mushing down for quite a ways, until it loses its downward motion.” Exactly that happened. The plane hit the ground, a big pancake in a plowed field. But the pilot, thinking he had hit the lead plane, ordered the co-pilot to bail out. The co-pilot promptly did so only to discover that his jump from the wing to the ground was over in about three feet. He yelled to the pilot, “Don’t jump, I’m in a cornfield.” The pilots walked back to base. The next day a truck had to pull the plane out to a grassy spot where it could take off. That night, according to McGovern, “I’ve never seen a human being so mad or so scared” as the colonel in charge. He pulled the trainees into the briefing room - about 150 of them - and said, “I want you sons of bitches to turn around and look at the guy next to you, because you’re looking at the biggest asshole you’re ever going to see in your life - and so is he.” The colonel said he ought to wash the entire class out. He called it the worst class ever at Pampa. “There isn’t one of you that deserves to get your wings.” There were other problems. McGovern was now an air cadet, making $125 per month.  Eleanor was supposed to get $75 of that, but because of some bureaucratic screwup, she didn’t, while George